Book Review By Terri Schlichenmeyer, Northend Agent’s
For weeks, you’ve been picking at a scar.
Your brain says to stop, but your heart likes the sweet pain you get when you pick, pick, pick. It’s a scar from loss, a scar of trauma – yours, and your parent’s – a scar that might heal in time, or maybe not. You’ve been around awhile and you’ve had bruises but this one, as in the new memoir, “Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead” by Angela Nissel, this one hurts the most.
Gwendolyn Nissel had had a lot of triumphs.
She’d fought her way to an Ivy League education, marched for Civil Rights, and worked with the Black Panthers. She raised two kids on her own, and held decent jobs to keep food on the table. She could do anything.
Except beat cancer.
Her daughter, Angela Nissel, was thirty-five, living in California, and looking for a job to match the TV-writer-producer work she’s known for when Gwendolyn was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Nissel’s marriage had crumbled. She was flat-broke but she knew where her place was: back in Philly with her newly-married mom, who said she was “fine.”
She wasn’t “fine.” Gwendolyn was sick, and Nissel soon became her caretaker.
Getting Gwendolyn away from the new husband, who was in the process of taking all her money, was Nissel’s first order of business. Getting her to L.A. was the next step, and to a highly-regarded doctor, but the cancer had metastasized too far…
Grief is different for everyone, and Nissel was surprised to realize that she hated anybody who still had a mother. She’d prayed that God might spare her mom. She tried to love the cancer away. She fought with the brother she adored, until they argued and he cut ties with her.
How is it possible to survive without a mother? How do you stop fighting a fierce enemy like cancer, and start saying goodbye?
First thing: should you bring tissues when you read “Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead”? Yes, you’ll need them for awhile; author Angela Nissel tells a story of loss and grief that’s raw and honest. And funny.
Don’t think that the humor is disrespectful, though. Nissel has a keen ability to highlight the bitter pill of caretaking one’s beloved parent, the horror of breast cancer for Black American women, and the expectations demanded by our culture in the grieving process, and she shows readers the personal absurdity of these things. Going further, she lets us in on her family’s complicated dynamics, and she subtly explains how she stood in her own way sometimes. Then she’s devastatingly funny, which could be beneficial to someone who’s grieving or about-to-be-grieving – though for some readers, this candor-humor mix may hit wrong, depending on where you are in the process, so be mindful.
Also beware that there’s profanity sprinkled quite liberally throughout this memoir, but it fits where it is. Laugh or cry, they’re both here, and “Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead” is the right book to pick.
