Motherland: A Memoir | by Pamela Marin

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Chicago native Pamela Marin's powerful Motherland defies sensationalism or sentimentality, though the story it tells could have broken the bank on both counts.

In 1973, when Marin was 14, her mother died of breast cancer, "before breast cancer walkathons and pink breast cancer lapel ribbons and breast-cancer-surviving celebrities splashed into the news." Before, in short, there was the community or the conversation around breast cancer that there is now. Mildred Lady spent the last months of her life in a Christian Scientist retreat in California, returning to Chicago to die alone in a hospital bed just a few miles from her husband, daughter and son living in Evanston. And then, for all intents and purposes, she was simply erased from her daughter's life by a father who "purged our home and family life of her as soon as she was gone."

Motherland is Marin's haunting account of her journey toward trying to understand and know the mother who lived to die like this. At 29, Marin, then a reporter for California's Orange County Register, comes to a breaking point where she realizes she cannot go forward until she goes back. Much of the poignancy of Motherland derives from the situation of the adult woman researching her mother's life as she would a news story. What the child never knew, the adult uncovers--with the anguish and outrage of an adult knowing full well what her childhood self had lost. That the daughter did not know her mother was dying alone, and could have gotten to her, provides the anguish that underlies the memoir and gives it a gravitas past its own story. That she was kept from knowing by her father, who stands at the gate of her mother's life like a resistant Charon, fuels the rage that keeps the narrative tone cool and unflinching.

Marin returns to her mother's hometown in Tennessee, where she discovers, like someone coming out of a silent movie into sound, a woman still vibrantly and complexly alive in the memories of relatives and friends. Through those memories and the artifacts they give her--paintings, photographs, yearbooks--Marin retraces her mother's life right up to her last hour, when she died alone in Northwestern Memorial Hospital. All of this is presented in tightly focused scenes, falling one after the other, as evenly and inexorably as slides, Marin's great gift being restraint coupled with an eye for the details that matter. The pathos she renders so cleanly and sparely is the pathos of discovery.

Of course the double hand this memoir deals is that retrieving her mother means losing her father, for her desire to know what happened is seen by him as an insurmountable betrayal." `Why are you doing this to me?' " he yells at her toward the middle of the memoir. Much of the latter half of Motherland recounts Marin's battles with her father to get at the story, and more, to get at the stuff of her mother's life: the letters and boxes of photographs he had buried away in a storage locker after her death. The testimony to Marin's strengths is that her father's question, "Why are you doing this?"--a question asked in countless families--resonates on so many levels throughout the memoir; and the father, though unforgiven, remains a powerful and complicated character.

That is why Motherland sticks with you long after it's done. Marin travels far beyond the borders of a daughter's search for her dead mother to bring us a searing look at the long tendrils of grief wrapped around every member of a family.

— Sarah Blake, Chicago Tribune

“Memoirs tend to come in two flavors: saccharine or bitter. But Pamela Marin’s Motherland gives a wide berth to sentimentality while retaining its heart. The author’s quest to know her mother is fraught with pain; she berates herself for crying and tries valiantly to maintain journalistic detachment. But to no avail. The strength of Motherland is its unvarnished emotion, even when the book fairly crackles with resentment and regret.

The main target of Marin’s anger: her father, a self-absorbed adman who seemingly ships his dying wife off to a Christian Science retreat, leaving 14-year-old Marin with many questions and no answers. Only by traveling into her mother’s past does she forge the connection she so desperately seeks.

Motherland’s lessons—about ancestry and independence, remembrance and reconciliation—will resonate with those trying to create their own sense of family.”

— More magazine

"Marin has written a mystery-like work about her mother's life, with the author playing a latter-day Sherlock Holmes and her father acting as the slippery double agent who does all he can to avoid giving a straight answer. The trail begins when Marin is 29 years old and starts having dreams about her mother, Mildred, who died of breast cancer when Marin was 14. She'd been sick for years but never told Marin, and the two didn't see each other during the last months of Mildred's life. Mildred died alone in California, 2,000 miles from the family's Illinois home.

Like any good newspaper reporter (Marin is a former staff writer for the Orange County Register), she can't rest until she cracks the story--which, in this case, involves figuring out how her Baptist mother ended up "dying in the loveless embrace" of her father's religion, Christian Science. Marin's odyssey brings her to Mildred's Tennessee hometown; to Chicago, where Mildred worked as an artist and raised her children; and to Arden Woods, Calif., the lonely retreat where Marin's father sent his wife to learn about his faith.

Throughout this memorable tale, the missing piece is always Marin's self-centered father, whose 30-years-younger girlfriend raises suspicions of her own. Although the detective story doesn't tie up neatly in the last chapter, it's a satisfying family saga. "

— Publishers Weekly

"Pamela Marin's memoir of searching for her lost mother is piercing and sad and beautifully written. Like all good family stories, it is full of surprises—acts of kindness, cruelty, and forgiveness that lead us back to our own histories."

— Elizabeth Benedict, author of Almost