The End of Eve

Starred review from January 15, 2014
A journalist and award-winning author's mordantly humorous memoir about caring for, and surviving, her terminally ill mother. Hip Mama publisher Gore (All the Pretty People: Tales of Carob, Shame, and Barbie-Envy, 2011, etc.) was living in Portland, Ore., and raising a small son with her lesbian partner, Sol, when she discovered that her charming but violent and capricious mother, Eve, was dying of cancer. Convinced that she needed to do as the Tibetan yogis she admired did and "go to the places that scared [her]," she became Eve's caregiver. Sol, in turn, demanded that they all move to the colorfully quirky city of Santa Fe, a place she had long romanticized--and where a female mime she had once loved still lived. But before Gore could even get resettled, her mother took over the house her daughter had bought and began renovating it. While the author and her family scrambled to make a life "out of stardust and panic," Eve flirted outrageously with an Anais Nin scholar-turned-contractor, watched Hollywood noir movies and reminded everyone that she was dying. Spurred by this comically inappropriate behavior and memories of Eve re-enacting the wire hanger scene from Mommie Dearest for fun, Gore stood up to her mother--and got thrown out. In the meantime, Sol stalked her old girlfriend, and the life Gore had "always imagined she [wanted]" soon fell apart. Desperate to understand her own role in making "all this violence seem necessary and inevitable," Gore fled to a house outside of Santa Fe where she began redefining the meaning of love. By turns tender and heartbreaking, Gore's book is a brave, thoroughly authentic journey to the center of the human heart. Wickedly sharp reading filled to bursting with compassion, rage, pain and wit.

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March 15, 2014
Gore (Bluebird, 2010) has written about happiness and motherhood before. This book is about both seen from a very different and personal perspective. Specifically, it is about the end of her mother's life and how Gore gives up, if not everything, then quite a lot to make her mother's last days as peaceful, even happy, as possible, even as Gore has to deal with monotonous paperwork and all the other complicated problems associated with end-of-life issues. Gore's relationship with her mother was never easy. Eve could be difficult and prone to temper tantrums. Far from being morose, though, this is a darkly humorous and at times even insanely cheerful account, launched by her mother's nonchalant announcement that she has been diagnosed with lung cancer. Eve, Gore, and Gore's partner move into a big house in New Mexico, where Gore has visions of their unconventional household turning into something that is part Terms of Endearment, part Grey Gardens, and part Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Altogether, a quiet, funny, unsentimental portrait of caregiving and bearing witness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)