An innovative memoir connecting ideas of grief, memory, and animals to
illustrate the importance of storytelling.
When his mother died, Timothy C. Baker discovered that there was almost
no record of her existence, and no stories that were his to tell: the
only way to bring her back was through reading. Reading My Mother Back
is a genre-bending memoir that explores a life marked by trauma,
illness, religion, and abuse through a focus on the books Baker and his
mother shared. The book combines accounts of rereading childhood
classics with true and apocryphal stories of a quiet life, marked by
great sorrow and great joy. The book is about grief and memory and how
our childhood reading shapes the way we see the world; it's about
loneliness and the search for belonging; it's about how ordinary lives
are transfigured by storytelling.
Moving from accounts of American evangelical communities to kidney
failure, from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, and from guilt to
love, Baker shows how literature provides a framework for understanding
our experiences, and offers a way of connecting with everything we have
lost. The book illustrates how children's animal stories bring us into a
love of the world, and how acts of rereading become a way not of
assuaging grief, but of bringing the past and present together. Reading
My Mother Back offers a bold and personal view of why the stories we
read and share matter so much. And there are bunnies.
