English Writer Linda Grant.

DATE May 24, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Author Linda Grant discusses her book "Remind Me Who I
Am Again," an account of two grown-up daughters who watch their
mother decline into dementia
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Linda Grant describes her memoir as an account of how two grown-up daughters
watch their mother decline into dementia and watched her memory disappear.
She writes, `It's the story of how we made the cruel decision to take away her
freedom and put her in a home whether she wanted to go or not. In defiance of
every democratic instinct, it's not so unusual. Thousands do the same thing
every day.' Grant's book also reflects on how we are defined by our memories.
And Grant wonders, `How well do any of us really know our parents?'

Grant was born in Liverpool, and now lives in London. She's a novelist, as
well as a columnist and feature writer at the British paper, The Guardian.
Her memoir is called "Remind Me Who I Am Again." The first chapter takes
place in a department store dressing room as Grant tries to help her mother
buy a dress for the wedding of Grant's sister. I asked her why she started
the book that way.

Ms. LINDA GRANT (Author, "Remind Me Who I Am Again"): I did that because
when this incident happened, and I rang my sister as soon as I got home to
tell her, it seemed to go to the heart, the sort of essence of my mother's
dilemma, which was that on the one hand, she was perfectly able to go into a
department store and choose an outfit for herself with exactly the same
critical faculties that she'd all her life as a woman for whom clothes was
tremendously important, but at the same time, she couldn't actually remember
how she was related to the two people that she was with--myself and my nephew.

And that, I thought, went to the heart of the dilemma because in a way, I
think that people relate to people who have, you know, Alzheimer's or other
forms of dementia, as if they're just sort of sitting in a room blankly
staring into space. And part of the complexity of this condition is the way
some things are preserved. And you're looking at, you know, what is left, you
know? What are the things that are left when memory goes? In my mother's
case, it was the ability to shop.

GROSS: What was the form of dementia that she had?

Ms. GRANT: It's called in Britain multi-infarct or vascular dementia, and
it's not Alzheimer's. The effects are very, very similar, but it's caused by
a series of small strokes which take place in the brain. They're invisible.
It's not the sort of stroke that you would even know was happening while it
was happening. And each time you have one of these strokes, what happens is
that it cuts off another area of the brain and it affects memory first of all.

GROSS: As her short-term memory faded, was her long-term memory affected
immediately as well?

Ms. GRANT: Well, I think that what happened was that she started to talk
about things which either she had not talked about for a very long time or
things that indeed she'd never talked about before, perhaps because there are
things that she had forgotten that she didn't want to talk about or that she
didn't want anyone to know about. And so she would sometimes come up with
extraordinary statements about the past with information that were not known
to me at all. And when I tried to program them often, you know, a moment or
two later, she had forgotten what she was talking about. It was immensely
frustrating. And part of the difficulty for me was that because my mother was
one of six who was married to one of six, and she was the last one of that 12
and all their husbands and wives, the whole kind of world of my parents'
generation and their parents' generation was sort of, you know, going away
with her memory. And so I was trying to catch the last kind of wisps of what
was left.

GROSS: Did she start telling you things that she had kept secret for years
and then be unable to finish the thought?

Ms. GRANT: Yes. There was an extraordinary moment when she was referring to
the fact that my--both sets of grandparents--both my sets of grandparents
were, you know, Russian or Polish immigrant Jews. And she was talking about
her own father and talking about--there was a child and there was a girl and
they came, and they raped her over and over and over again. And they had a
baby and then the baby was killed. And I said, `My God, what on Earth are you
talking about?' And she said, `I don't know. What was I saying?' And I have
no idea where this came from, whether it was a sort of, you know, family
secret from something which had happened in Poland, whether it was something
she had read in a film. I have no idea. But she never referred to it again.

GROSS: You went back to your father's birthplace in Poland. Did your
interest in your family history have to do with your mother's memory dying?

Ms. GRANT: I think it did. I mean, it was partly because with the collapse
of communism in Eastern Europe, it became possible to go to these places. But
I think there was a sort of realization that, you know, my mother started to
develop dementia when I was in my, I suppose, late 30s, early 40s. And I
think for the sort of first part of my life, I was part of the generation
which was sort of coming of age. I was in my teens in the 1960s. And I
really felt that anything that my parents had to say was kind of boring and
irrelevant. Because I was living in Liverpool, which was, you know, the
capital of the world as far as I was concerned and The Beatles were right
there on my very own doorstep. (Technical difficulties) Paul McCartney and
John Lennon. And so when my parents would talk about the past, which was
actually not very often, I just blanked it out. I was just not listening to
anything that they had to say. And so there may well have been information
that they were giving me, but I was just not taking it in. And, of course, as
I got older, I began to be deeply curious about, you know, what this world was
that, you know, I had neglected.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Linda Grant. And she's written
a memoir about her mother's last years living with dementia. It's called
"Remind Me Who I Am Again."

You had to decide whether to put your mother in a home and when was the right
time to do it. Early on when you talked to your mother about the possibility
of a home, what was her reaction?

Ms. GRANT: Well, her reaction was completely negative, as you might expect.
She didn't want to do this. And she, you know, believed completely that she
could look after herself. And the problem was that, you know, she gave the
version of events to the world, which was not the version of events that it
was. So if people said to her, you know, `Do you cook properly and eat?,' she
would say, `Oh, I eat three meals a day, I never miss.' `Do you remember to
take your medication?' `Oh, yes, yes, I always remember to take it.' But I
knew that all this information was incorrect. And part of the growing problem
that I think everybody, every child who has a parent with some kind of
dementia, you know, has to confront is that suddenly your parent becomes your
child. And you're forced into a position of having to make a decision which
is against their will, and particularly against every notion of, you know, the
dignity of the individual and of the adult. And it was very, very
problematic.

GROSS: Well, you wanted to consult with her about whether she should go into
a home. But it sounds like she wasn't really even cognizant of what her own
problems were.

Ms. GRANT: No, she had very, very little insight into what was going on with
her. There was a tremendous amount of denial about what was going on. But at
the same time, a lot of that was, you know, very buried and unacknowledged.
She was tremendously upset by her own condition. And one of the things that
she did was to cut herself off from all of her friends, for fear that she
would embarrass herself. And so gradually, she became a prisoner in her own
home because she didn't dare go out because she was conscious that if she did
go out, she would get lost. And if she went out to see any of her friends,
she was conscious that she was constantly repeating herself and that she knew
there was something the matter. So she sort of constructed a kind of a
fantasy world that she lived in, which is what she would tell people. But
that was very, very far from the truth. And I think that what she really was
was sort of a terribly lonely and very isolated prisoner inside her own house
who was not eating properly, not bathing either. She had, you know, other
medication for different problems. And she was either overdosed or not taking
it at all. And it was a really--I mean a tragic and awful state that she was
in.

GROSS: At what point did you decide, well, whether your mother wants to be in
a home or not, she needs to be in a home?

Ms. GRANT: There was a turning point. And it was one particular day. It was
Yom Kippur and I had taken her in the morning to the synagogue. Because she
had diabetes, you know, I told her very clearly that she couldn't fast. And
we went to a cafe for lunch and my father--my mother was, you know, a
religious practicing Jew. And she said to me, `I must give you some money.'
And I said, `What for?' And she said, `For the film.' And I said, `What are
you talking about?' And she said, `We've just been to see a film. I can't
remember what it is. But I know we've seen one.' And she clearly had some
memory of herself as being in some kind of audience where some kind of show
was going on, something was happening that she was witnessing.

And I just looked at her and thought, `No, this cannot go on any longer
because this is something which is so central, so deep-seated to who she is,
something which has happened the whole of her life, going to the synagogue,
and if she doesn't remember, you know, that half an hour ago that is what she
was doing, then this has got to stop.' You know, this person clearly has lost
touch with the sort of, you know, nailing down of what has been her own life's
reality.

GROSS: You know, another option would have been to move in with her or have
her move in with you. Is that an option you considered?

Ms. GRANT: It was never an option that either my sister or I considered.
And we felt very guilty for not considering it. I think the dilemma was that
my mother had grown up as a very, very traditional and dutiful daughter and
expected that she would have two very dutiful and conventional daughters. And
what she had instead, unfortunately for her, were two feminists who were, you
know, absolutely adamant that we were going to build very, very different
lives for ourselves. And I felt the most tremendous sense of guilt that I
felt that other people would say, you know, `Well, I would never put my mother
in a home. I love her too much for that.' But I'd had a very problematic
relationship with my mother. And part of the problem was that she had the
expectation that I would be a suburban mother and housewife, who would be
living around the corner from her. And what she had instead were two very
strong-willed career women as daughters. And it was part of that gap that
made it so completely impossible.

GROSS: You write for the British newspaper, The Guardian.

Ms. GRANT: Yeah.

GROSS: Did you think it would be absolutely impossible to keep up with your
career and give your mother the kind of full-time care that she required?

Ms. GRANT: Well, my job involves me being away for long periods of time.
And I've just come back from two weeks in Germany and Austria. And it also
involves me working at home for very long and very concentrated periods of
time writing. And my mother was in a state in which she needed really
constant care and attention, which I was not able to give her.

GROSS: And you say you felt guilty about that?

Ms. GRANT: Yeah. I mean, I felt guilty about it because I thought, you
know, `Well, you know, what kind of person wouldn't give up their career to
look after their mother?' But when I first wrote about this and first started
talking about it, you know, what people said to me was, `You shouldn't feel
guilty,' because, in fact, the kind of care that she needed was a very
professional form of care. She needed nursing. She needed all kinds of
things. And the problem was that she was very, very clearly taking out her
own depression and fear on the person that was closest to her, which were all
the people that were closest to her, which were her daughters. And so when I
talked to her--I mean, she would behave towards me in the most terrible,
terrible manner; I mean, really, really dreadful because part of the
condition was that the parts of her brain which would normally stop you from
saying things that are hurtful to others had now been cut away completely.
And so she would scream and rage at me. And I know that other people have had
this experience as well.

GROSS: My guest is Linda Grant, author of the new memoir, "Remind Me Who I Am
Again." More after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest Linda Grant has written a memoir about her mother's decline
into dementia and the difficult decision to put her into a home.

How did you handle her memory lapses? Like when she insisted that something
didn't happen that you witnessed and you knew it happened, would you correct
her, criticize her, just accept that this was part of the way you had to
communicate now?

Ms. GRANT: Well, it took me a really long time to deal with this. And I
don't think that I dealt with it very well at all. I mean, I think that part
of the kind of early stages of the disease involved her saying things and me
thinking, `Why are you saying that? I don't understand why you're saying
that. You know that's not right.' And then me trying to correct her. Part
of the real difficulty about her loss of memory was that once she was in the
home--and she very much didn't want to be in the home--she was very insistent
that there was an alternative, and that I was preventing her from this other
alternative, which is that she would move back to Liverpool, which was where
she had spent most of her life, and would be looked after by her older sister.
But the problem with that scheme was that this older sister had been dead for
about 20 years.

And by correcting her and explaining that this was not possible, it was
breaking the news to her of her sister's death, as if she did not know it.
And so part of the time, one had to maintain a kind of fiction, which equally
made me feel extremely uncomfortable because, you know, it comes under the
category of humoring. And I would say, `Oh, yes, that's a marvelous scheme.
That's just fantastic. Why don't we do that?' And, of course, she
wouldn't remember, you know, from visit to visit that she had ever raised this
and so it would come up again.

I think one of the more kind of amusing aspects of this was I remember having
a conversation with her about my nephew who was then about sort of 12 or 13,
and her saying that she going to see him this evening, which I knew she
wasn't. And I said, `Oh, so where are you seeing him?' And she said, `He's
home on leave.' Now by this, I knew that she meant her brother who'd been
killed during the Second World War. And she said, `He's home on leave and he
wants to go and see a film. I prefer a love story, but I think he'd like an
action picture. What do you think?' You know, `What do you know that's on?'

And so we then began to discuss films of the 1940s. And I was saying, `Well,
I think there's a marvelous new picture with Bette Davis' and began to
describe the plot of "All About Eve." And she said, `Oh, that sounds
marvelous. Yes, I think we'll go and see that.' And this conversation, you
know, if you'd stumbled across it, would have sounded completely sane and
rational, except that it was taking place in the mid-1990s instead of 1943.
And that was the sort of, you know, the oddness, the eeriness of this
condition.

GROSS: What was it like for you to realize that your mother in a way had
become a different person, and that your whole way of relating to her had to
change, too?

Ms. GRANT: I think it was enormously hard because, you know, one of the
things that one had to deal with was, `Who was the different person?' And,
you know, one of the problems was that we were looking for the parts of her
which had been retained and the parts that had been lost. Right up until,
really, sort of just before she died, she maintained, you know, incredibly
high standards about the way she dressed and the way she looked. But on the
other hand, when she went into the home, which was not as we expected, you
know, very sort of gracefully furnished, you know, filled with sort of
antiques and things like that, but rather institutional. She really didn't
notice that at all. That didn't bother her. And we had thought that she
would be quite upset about that. But in fact, she wasn't upset about that at
all. But, you know, until the very, very end, clothes were the things that
mattered to her.

I have to say that she preserved, you know, some sense of her own personality
until very, very late on. And the very last time I saw her when I think I
could categorically say that she knew who I was, the head of the home said,
`Did she know who you were?' And I said, `Yes, because of one thing that she
said.' And I said--she said, `What was that?' And it was, `I don't like your
hair,' which was exactly the sort of thing that she would say to me. So, in
fact, the very last thing she said to me as a mother, you know, as a mother,
as a person who knew who I was was, `I don't like your hair.' And that was
really fairly typical. Very shortly after that, she became extremely
childlike and started becoming interested in sort of flowers and small
animals, which was totally untypical and very peculiar and very, very
difficult to deal with because this was completely unrecognizable.

GROSS: Did it change your sense of who you are since you were her daughter
and she had so completely changed?

Ms. GRANT: You know, that's a complex question. I think it made me think
very, very hard about the ways that I was like her and the ways that I was not
like her. And I think I'd always had a stronger relationship with my father
than with my mother. But I think for the most part, the problem was that my
mother and I had been having a row all our lives about me not being the
daughter that she wanted me to be. And, you know, I was still ready to go on
having that row with her. But we were sort of trapped in a particular place
where you could make no resolutions or no means of moving forward because, you
know, she couldn't--in order to make a resolution of something, you have to
remember that the conversation has been had and, you know, the realization has
been made and you move forward from it.

But we were kind of locked in, you know, a cycle in which the same things
would come up over and over and over again. And, you know, the main thing
that she said really kind of right--almost to the end--was `I'm the only one
whose daughters went away to university and never came back,' by which she
meant that she wanted to be like those friends of hers whose daughters, you
know, had not gone to university, had married young and were housewives who
lived around the corner from their mothers. And we never resolved that
matter.

GROSS: Linda Grant, her new memoir is called "Remind Me Who I Am Again."
She'll be back in a second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Back with Linda Grant, author of
the new memoir "Remind Me Who I Am, Again." It's about her mother's dementia
and the difficult decision to put her into a home. Grant is a novelist and a
columnist at the British paper The Guardian.

When you did decide that it was time for your mother to live in a home, the
home that you put her in was called Jewish Care. In the United States,
there's just enormous problems people have finding a good home, when the time
comes for it, and finding one that is both affordable and pleasant enough so
that you feel at all comfortable with the idea of having a parent in the home.
Did you have a similar crisis, or are things very different in England?

Ms. GRANT: I'm sure they're no different in England. We didn't have the
issue of going around and inspecting homes, and the reason for that was
because--in order to be admitted into a home in Britain, if the government is
going to partially fund that experience, you need to have a referral from a
social worker who says this person needs to be in a home. And right up to the
bitter end, social workers were absolutely insistent that my mother was
supportable in the community, despite the fact that the community was saying
that it couldn't support her.

And what happened was she--her home help arrived to find that she was
suffering an angina attack; took her into hospital, where the hospital said,
`We cannot release this person back into anything but 24-hour care, and you
are going to have to find a home for her in the course of the next three or
four days.' And so we were placed into a kind of crisis situation, in which
my mother went from being supportable in the community and not needing to be
in a home to being an emergency case.

And so she was catapulted into a home, which at first we had extreme
reservations about. And I have to say that those reservations were mainly to
do with, partly, I think the very justifiable fears about abuse, which takes
place in homes for the elderly, partly because we were judging the home by a
set of criteria which were not the right set of criteria. We were looking,
for example, at the decor. I don't think that for a woman in my mother's
condition, that was the right criteria.

What we needed to look at was actually the quality of the care. We needed to
look at the staff. We needed to look at how the staff were relating to her.
We needed to look at how they understood her as a person in the round. And
from that point of view, the experience right to the very end, right to her
death, was absolutely outstanding, but I know that that's rare.

GROSS: Now you say the person who had the greatest influence on your thinking
about dementia and the role of residential care was John Bridgewater(ph), who
was the head of residential services at Jewish Care, the home that your mother
lived in at the end of her life. I'd like you to read some of the advice that
he gave you, which you reprint at the end of your book.

Ms. GRANT: `In a way, your mother is dead, and in a way. she's not dead. But
you're equally dead because you're not the child she carried through to
whatever point. So how do you hang on to whatever sense you have of who that
person really was, is and should be about so that you don't just stick them in
a box somewhere and forget about it and, at the same time, recognize the
reality that you have to let go? You just have to let go. And people find it
extraordinarily difficult with dementia because they're letting go of
themselves as well. You can't finish the story. You can't resolve whatever
it was, and you can't bury it. You can't let go. Without memories, there's
chaos. Without memory, we don't exist.

When a member of the family starts to lose their memory, it turns everything
upside down because not only are they losing their recall of you, your recall
of them is challenged. It's almost a challenge to your own existence. If you
live in the memory of someone else, and their memory starts to fade, where are
you? It's a strange thing, and people find it extremely worrying, upsetting.
And the natural way of dealing with that is some sort of denial. And I
remember when your sister came to see me that first day. She was so angry, so
upset because somehow it was too frightening. If her mother was that bad,
it's almost like you don't exist yourself.

If your mother can't remember you, on what basis do you relate to your mother?
Or if she's not sure if you're her sister or your daughter? It's like being
thrown out to sea. So the whole thing about memory is that it's not just one
member of the family losing their memory. And for the Jewish community, it's
even more complex because, while all cultures have to deal with memory, none
more so than the Jewish community in which everything is about what was.

Let her be as she is now. Let her be. If she was in her full and right
senses, would she be worried about you all the time? That you will be living
a life aside from her fantasies and anxieties? Why can't you let her be the
same way? Let her be for the day.'

GROSS: What do you think he meant by `let her be'?

Ms. GRANT: I think that he meant that she was existing in a reality of her
own, and that I was trying to impose another reality on her, which had been
her reality as well, but a reality of a world which has memory. And if you
don't have memory, you live in a completely different state. Your state is
not the same as the rest of the world. And I think he wanted us to leave her
alone to form a world in which there was no memory and to try to exist in it
from day to day.

GROSS: Could you do that?

Ms. GRANT: It was very, very hard. And I said that the staff in the home
were very, very good because they knew how to do it. They knew how not to tax
her with things which were beyond her ability or comprehension. I always
remember an incident in which I was trying to get my mother to put her coat on
before we went out, and she wouldn't put her coat on. And I was so perplexed
by this and so annoyed and angry, and I was dealing with her saying, `I don't
need a coat,' and me saying to her, `Yes, you need a coat because it's cold
outside,' and then the home saying, `Do you realize that your mother has
forgotten how to do up buttons? And this is why she's covering up and this is
why she doesn't want to put her coat on.'

So you need a much deeper perception, beyond the reality we take to be the
every day. You put a coat on, you do up the bottoms, and here was somebody
who didn't know how to do up buttons. And you have to see very, very deep
into that kind of mentality, into what may or may not be lost.

GROSS: So would the solution have been to say, `Let me put your coat on,' and
just put it on for her without even asking?

Ms. GRANT: Yes, exactly. Exactly. That was what I should have done, and I
didn't know. I didn't realize.

GROSS: My guest is Linda Grant, author of the memoir "Remind Me Who I Am,
Again." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Linda Grant. She's a British
writer who, in addition to writing books, writes for The Guardian. She has a
new memoir about her mother's last years when she was suffering with dementia,
and the book is called "Remind Me Who I Am, Again."

When your parents were alive and well, were you able to talk with them about
the big issues, like life and death and meaning of life?

Ms. GRANT: No, I don't think so. They weren't those kinds of people. They
were not educated to start with. My father left school at the age of 10; my
mother at the age of 14. You know, they were the children of immigrants, and
I don't think we ever really had those conversations.

GROSS: I'm going to ask you to read a paragraph from your book, in which you
describe your family and their attitude toward introspection.

Ms. GRANT: OK. `They were all hypochondriacs, constantly kvetching about
their lungs and their hearts and their feet, showing anyone who could stomach
the sight to look at the greenish, blood-streaked phlegm in their
handkerchiefs. And beneath the exuberance was a slight depressive morbidity
about them. My father, for one, was prone to falling into terrible
rages--"tissue paper anger," my mother called it--followed by solemn brooding
in a room on his own.

Death terrified them. They didn't know the meaning of introversion or
solitude and certainly not solipsism. Saul Bellow has said that the
unexamined life is meaningless, but that the examined life can make you want
to kill yourself.'

GROSS: Speaking of the examined life, writing a memoir can, in a way, be an
act of--or at least be perceived as an act of betrayal towards your family
because you're giving away their secrets, you're giving away the things that
the family has always tried to keep from the neighbors and the larger public.
When your father died and then your mother, basically, lost her memory, did
the meaning of giving away the family secrets change to you?

Ms. GRANT: This book actually began in a very, very different form. It
began because I was trying to write a second novel, which was based on my
family. And I really didn't like at all what I was writing, and I felt that,
in an odd kind of a way, the characters that I was creating were kind of
asset-stripping my family's lives; you know, taking bits and pieces here and
there to turn into fictional characters.

And, you know, my parents were ordinary people. I mean, they never did
anything significant or important, but they were very extraordinary in one
kind of way, which was that they were the children of this, you know, first
generation of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants to Britain--not America,
to Britain, which is a very peculiar state because being Jewish immigrants in
Britain means that you don't have any part to play in making a contribution to
the construction of the national identity, a point which Philip Morton(ph)
Roth makes about Americans because the identity is constructed already.

And I felt that the story of this generation, of the children of immigrants,
who were cut off from the world that they had come from and were trying to
make their way in a new world of English-class society, had never really been
told. And the only way it could be told was by an act of betrayal, by telling
the family secrets. And I felt that I wanted to authenticate my parents'
lives by telling this story.

And the resonance of this story has rippled out far, far beyond what I might
have expected, because I started to get letters from people who said, `My
family are identical to yours.' And what they meant by that was that their
parents were immigrants often from Ireland, from Germany, from all kinds of
places. They were talking about the growing up in families where people
didn't talk about the past, where the past was cut off, where you had no sense
of where you came from. And this is a very odd thing to do in a country like
Britain, which sells itself to the world on the basis of heritage of its
history.

We had a history which only belonged in the 20th century, and we knew nothing
about anything that came before it. And by telling the story of a people
without history, in a country which is all about history, I felt that there
may have been a private betrayal, but there was something bigger--a bigger
story to be told.

GROSS: You know, one of the things I found really interesting and related to
this in your book is that, you know, you think a lot in your book about the
ways in which you were radically different from your mother and, in some ways,
a great disappointment to her because you weren't a traditional daughter. You
were a feminist, and you wanted a career and you wanted to live far away from
your parents. I mean, not just to be separated from them, but your work took
you far away from them, and you accepted that.

And then it started to dawn on you that your mother, although she thought of
herself as an obedient daughter, was really radically different from her own
mother. Can you talk about some of those differences?

Ms. GRANT: Well, this is very interesting because this is something that my
mother never would have acknowledged herself. I mean, she always said, you
know, that she was a dutiful daughter, but when I actually looked at the
history of my grandmother, who died before I was born, so I never met her, she
really was a traditional Jewish woman, you know, a woman who had come from
Russia, from Kiev, who obeyed, you know, every single ritual of a very
traditional, orthodox Jewish life.

Now my mother, on the other hand, before she married, she was a hairdresser,
which was an extremely modern job. And my mother, you know, dyed her hair.
She went out, she listened to the, you know, swing bands of the 1930s and the
1940s. She didn't obey all the different, you know, dietary laws that her
mother obeyed. And she had actually said something to me about, you know, how
she had not got married until her mother died, and I'd always assumed that
that was the case, until one of my cousins, who's quite a bit older than me,
said, `Well, that's not true because I was at your mother's wedding, and our
grandmother was there.'

And so, in a way, my mother had rewritten her own history to make herself into
a dutiful daughter, but I think that she may well have been equally a
disappointment to her own mother because here she was, the child of a woman
who had grown up, you know, literally in the old country, and was growing up
as a teen-ager in Britain in the 1930s and taking on board everything that
that meant.

GROSS: How do you remember your mother? Do you remember her as the older
woman whose body was giving out, who had no memory left? Or do you remember
her more from her younger years?

Ms. GRANT: At the moment, I very, very strongly remember the period when she
was in the home. She died last October, just only a few months ago, and I'm
hoping that, in time, the memory will recede. But she was in the home for
maybe four years, and it was an extremely traumatic time. And I think that
what is at the front of my attention at the moment were sort of the last five
weeks of her life, which were, in some ways, very extraordinary because the
last time she was able, really properly, to speak, her speech was amazing. It
was a combination of syllables of English and Yiddish, which, of course, had
been her first language.

So it was completely incoherent for the most part, but interspersed with
fragments of sentences in which she was clearly in extreme childhood. And the
sight of her, you know, coming out with this almost a sort of stream of
consciousness was most extraordinary.

What happened after that was that it was like somebody going around the house
turning off the lights and gradually, you know, every bodily function, you
know, stopped. And over the course of the five weeks, I watched her die, and
I had never watched anybody die before. And that, at the moment, is the
strongest recollection that I have, the strongest sense of her that I have.
And I really hope that, in time--you know, in two or three years--that will be
replaced by earlier memories. And, in fact, earlier memories are starting to
come at the moment.

GROSS: Do you have a lot of things that jog earlier memories, like
photographs or tape recordings, home movies?

Ms. GRANT: Well, we don't have home movies or tape recordings, but the most
extraordinary thing that happened was immediately after she died, when we had
not sold her flat and it was sort of lying there in much the same state as
when she left that day to go to the hospital--and we had to clear the flat out
to sell it. And we simply had to throw away or decide to keep absolutely
everything that was in this flat. And the most searing thing was coming up
with items, like, for example, her ironing board, which had been the ironing
board that she had bought when she got married in 1946.

And I realized that what we were doing was we were consigning to oblivion a
life and a marriage, and so many of the items in that flat provoked the
sharpest and most personal memories of the past. And, also, what I found in
the flat was my own past 'cause my mother, like I think many women of her
generation who lived through the war in Britain, was a great hoarder, and she
never threw anything away. And so we found, you know, school reports. I
found parts of my old school uniform; you know, thousands and thousands of
photographs; items of glass and china that, you know, had been her best glass
and china that we'd eaten so many family meals off, you know, at the height
of, you know, my family's kind of power as a family.

And, you know, that was the time in which the memories came back most sharply
and most strongly, and it was unbelievably traumatic to throw away these items
which were about the texture of everyday life, like an ironing board, for
example.

GROSS: Right. Linda Grant. Her memoir about her mother is called "Remind Me
Who I Am, Again." She spoke to us from the NPR bureau in London.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz on familiar and forgotten music.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Analysis: Two recent classical music performances, one in New York
City and the other in Cleveland
LINDA GROSS, host:

Two recent classical music performances--one of familiar music; the other,
obscure music--has left our music critic, Lloyd Schwartz, thinking about what
performers have to do to keep music vital.

LLOYD SCHWARTZ reporting:

While I was attending an academic conference in Cleveland, I could see the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from my hotel, but I didn't have time to go there.
I did get to hear the Cleveland Orchestra, though, on its home turf, the newly
restored Severance Hall. Everyone seems to regard the Cleveland as one of the
top five American orchestras. From concert tours and recordings I've heard,
it's my number one. But it's been some 30 years since I've heard them play in
Cleveland.

The hall itself is spiffy, a fantasia of art deco, circa 1931, and Egyptian
revival with swirling, leafy branches and silver arabesques covering the
ceiling. Better still, it sounds terrific with a lean, clear, yet warm
acoustic that suits these same qualities in the orchestra. Every instrument
can be heard and without any harshness.

It was a terrific program, too. It was a Beethoven weekend with Cleveland's
soon-to-be-retiring music director of the past 17 years, Christoph von
Dohnanyi, leading the Third Piano Concerto and a stirring performance of the
Eroica Symphony: fleet, ferocious, teasing, with passages of exquisite
quietude before the galloping finale.

(Soundbite from orchestra's performance)

SCHWARTZ: How do you make such a familiar work sound fresh and urgent? One
thing Dohnanyi did was go back to the 19th century tradition of separating the
first and second violins, stage right and stage left. This, of course, makes
for less mutual support, but you can hear the conversational dialogue or
arguments Beethoven composed for these two sections. Few contemporary
orchestras do this, and like the sparkling refurbishment of the hall, all the
accumulated dust on the music seemed to have been swept away.

On my way back to Boston, I stopped in New York for a great treat. The New
York City Opera at Lincoln Center was presenting choreographer and director
Mark Morris' delicious production of a forgotten 18th century comic ballet
opera, Jean-Philippe Rameau's "Platee." I've seen awful, stilted productions
of Rameau, full of so-called authentic baroque posing. They've made me wonder
how he could have been considered an important composer.

Mark Morris changes all that. For example, Rameau begins his opera in the
vineyards of Bacchus, the god of wine. Morris wittily translates this
prologue into a contemporary bar scene, with Bacchus as bartender. He mingles
the vocal soloist on stage with the dancers, who lip-sync the singing of the
chorus in the pit.

The opera proper tells the tale of how Jupiter cured the jealousy of his wife,
Junon, by pretending to be in love with an amphibious creature named Platee,
queen of the swamp, a grotesque cross between a salamander and a frog who
thinks she's the cat's pajamas. The stage is inhabited by dozens of swamp
things dressed in swamp wear, designed by Isaac Mizrahi. The tiny, but
extraordinary tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt makes Platee a memorable and
touching character. And there isn't a note of music that escapes Morris' eye
for the stage.

In the end, it's not just clever ideas or technical dexterity, but imaginative
attention to detail, whether it's in a familiar Beethoven symphony or an
obscure baroque opera that creates the most vivid and satisfying performances.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz teaches creative writing at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, and is classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix.

(Station credits given)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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