Nancy Bachrach never thought her memoir, The Center of the Universe, would be published. Under those circumstances, “you say the unsay-able,” she said. “You think you’re writing only for yourself.”
Her memoir has been published and now we can all read her very humorous account of events that seem, on the surface at least, not very humorous. After all, the book begins with a boating accident that claims her father’s life and seriously injures her mother. Right from the beginning we know Bachrach’s tale will make us laugh. As we learn more about Bachrach’s life with her mother, however, that humor is tempered with sensitivity and empathy. Lola, was bipolar at a time when the condition was misunderstood and misdiagnosed. Her behavior had a ripple effect, touching everyone around her. Looking back, Bachrach is able to find humor in situations that, at the time, were anything but funny. But her touch is light. We never feel she is laughing at her mother, rather, she uses humor to understand and survive.
When Bachrach receives the phone call from her brother announcing the tragedy, she is in France trying to sell deodorant to the French. (The assignment is code-named “Stink-o”). Bachrach’s father, Mort, was a repairman, the quality of his work exemplified by work on his boat’s generator that choked out carbon monoxide while the couple slept onboard. Ironically, the boat was named “Mr. Fix-It.”
Mort suffocates on the boat while Lola lapses into a coma and is taken to a small country hospital, Our Lady by the Sea. “The admitting physician, a seventy-year-old family doctor…had already written Lola off, noting in her chart that the patient was unlikely to survive her `comma.’” She does survive and this mother-daughter relationship forms the heart of this memoir.
Bachrach’s childhood was a series of embarrassments caused by the woman who called herself “the center of the universe” and kept her family’s world constantly spinning out of control. Even the best-behaved parents embarrass adolescents. Lola’s behavior created a nightmare world for Bachrach and her siblings, her sister, Helen, and brother, Ben. Yet if their world was horrible, it was mild compared with what Lola put up with. Trapped in a psychotic prison, she often underwent treatments that would now be banned at Guantanamo—shock treatment, leeches up the nose, medication with unbearable side effects.
After the accident, Bachrach shows up at her mother’s bedside. Has her mother sustained brain damage? Who will take care of her now that Mort is gone? Soon Bachrach finds herself putting off a return to France and her deodorant project to become her mother’s caretaker. A year after the accident, the doctors call Lola’s case “a recovery that defies medical explanation.”
When Bachrach ran into one of her mother’s friends at a luncheon, the woman berated her with, “You’re not going to publish one of those `Mommie Dearest,’ books, are you?” The reference is to a scathing memoir written by Joan Crawford’s daughter. Yet Bachrach’s mother was the one who pushed her to have the book published. “My mother read it and said, `You have to publish it,’” said Bachrach. Now eight-two years old, Lola doesn’t care what people think about her or her family. Perhaps she also hopes that documenting her journey will help others coping with mental illness.
“Every year, [Lola] gets less cotton-headed, and while she’s not exactly a live wire yet, at least she doesn’t short-circuit anymore,” Bachrach writes. “The new Lola is a bit dotty, but maybe that’s not such a terrible thing.”
The Center of the Universe: A Memoir
By Nancy Bachrach
www.nancybachrach.com
