Mothers with Alzheimer’s

Born within a year of each other (1948–49), and each their mother’s only birth child, Caterina Edwards, an Albertan Canadian, and Mary Gordon, an American raised in New York, have much else in common. Both are writers first, but also academics; both were raised in Catholic homes and are, or have been, practising Catholics; both have some claim to European ethnicity in that Gordon’s mother’s family was steeped in Irishness (her father was Italian and Jewish), while Edward’s mother was Italian (her father was English). It would take a specialist to deconstruct the influence of that ethnicity on the subject of Gordon’s Circling My Mother: A Memoir, other than to say that Gordon appears to have done everything in her power to shake off those influences, while, in Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, A Daughter in Search of the Past, Edwards acknowledging them somewhat ruefully but seems still to respect and live with them.

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