Lynne Tillman’s account of the 11 years she and her two sisters spent co-ordinating the care of their mother towards the end of her life is – unlike most memoirs of this kind – not really a book about loss. Rather, it addresses the complexities and harsh practicalities of adult caregiving. Tillman is honest about struggling with the demands that caring for her mother entailed, but still felt obliged to do it.

This ambivalence is described in spare, almost brutally blunt prose, and it can make for thrilling and uncomfortable reading. Some online reviews have raised the criticism that we do not get to know Tillman’s mother, but Tillman states throughout that the book is about her own experience of this period of time, it is not about her mother’s experience itself, although that is also touched upon. More valid, however, are criticisms of Tillman’s classist attitude towards her mother’s paid caregivers.

Mothercare is a kind of reckoning with death, a subject which Tillman had previously avoided until she could no longer do so. This is an attitude many of us share, and if this book has a message, it is maybe to confront the unavoidable while we still have time.