Book Review: Wishing For Snow

Minrose Gwin has written a memoir about her mother's descent into madness. And as is usually the case with daughters and sons of parents burdened with mental illness, the weight of worrying about "will it happen to me" is a heavy one.

The book is filled with poems her mother wrote, some of which were published. Lists she strangely left behind. Scattered letters from her childhood on. 

Gwin points out that mental illness happens to the entire family. 

As I know from my own family, it melts like a candle. And leaves a waxy surface residue for all involved to slip and slide upon. Trying to get their own bearings in a life surrounded by the unknown.

There is much pain in her writing. A splintering of hope, in her earlier years, that her mother would get better. That they could have a normal mother/daughter relationship. Someday. Of course someday never came.

Her mother's many myriad and chaotic moods turned every vestige of hope into regret and sadness. 

Gwin tried many times to write this. I'm sure the pain that was revisited caused her to pull the string of her parachute before she fell amongst the sorrow. Like falling into the snow her mother so loved, she might sink quietly below the surface. And perhaps, her injured psyche might not resurface. 

Her writing is inventive in its poetic fierceness. She seems to attempt to mask reality in shades of gray. So that the inexplicable truths underneath are not completely transparent to the reader. As though she must still try to protect her mother. And cloak the illness that resided within her in darkness, so that others will not judge her harshly.  

Gwin writes of the first time they committed her mother to the mental hospital:

"Alarmed by her strange letters and phone calls, I come down to visit, take one look at her, and see only bones and hair and eyes, as if she has peeled herself back to the last nonfleshy remnants of herself.

"We plot and plan. We tell the roofing crew across the street not to worry when they see us carrying a screaming woman from the house. We jump my mother as she prepares for a nap and pick her up by her arms and legs and place her kicking and screaming in the car. The roofers watch open-mouthed from their roof. "

You want to avert your eyes, look away from the suffering. But compassion makes you look head on at this very poignant telling of a life lived in suspension. Walking on eggshells. Never knowing when the volcano would erupt. And how long it would last. 

This book is about the stain that is left behind. One that cannot be washed out. Long after the person that left it is dead and gone.