The Book of Mother

May 1, 2021

To daughter Violaine, her Maman, Catherine, is fabulously larger than life, extravagantly engaged in living and loving, smoking and laughing. Then Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown and returns home difficult and disruptive, soon revealing to Violaine and her sister her own traumatized upbringing. A former curator of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's distinguished literary series, Paris-born Huisman first published this debut in France, where it racked up some big awards (e.g., the Prix Fran�oise Sagan). A ferocious look at the mother-daughter bond; with a 60,00-copy first printing.

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Starred review from August 9, 2021
Huisman’s excellent debut chronicles the life of a charming but volatile Frenchwoman. Catherine, a manic-depressive dancer and mother of two, is as prone to fits of rage and mood swings as she is to expressing her love for her daughters. Violaine, her youngest, recounts events that took place when she was 10, in 1989. Catherine’s third marriage has failed, and she intentionally drives her car with Violaine and Violaine’s older sister, Elsa, into oncoming traffic on the Champs-Élysées. They all survive, and the girls’ father, Antoine, Catherine’s second husband, arranges with their grandmother, Jacqueline, to have her committed. Violaine then charts Catherine’s bitter relationship with Jacqueline, and Jacqueline’s own painful history, having been forced by her parents to marry her rapist, Catherine’s father, whom she manages to later leave. Though Catherine has a short leg, she trains at eight to dance just like her mother, and the pair later open rival dance schools. Later, Catherine ends her stable first marriage for the wealthy Antoine. The novel’s final section follows Violaine and Elsa, now adults, as they try to carry out Catherine’s wishes after her suicide in her Paris apartment. Huisman’s storytelling ability is immense: Violaine unfurls the wide-ranging narrative like a raconteur at a party, and develops a kaleidoscopic portrait of Catherine. This thoughtful exploration of familial trauma and love will have readers riveted. Agent: Mark Kessler, Susanna Lea.

August 15, 2021
A portrait of a life lived like a swiftly burning candle. Known to her two daughters as "Maman," to herself as "Catherine," and to the world at large by a series of surnames that change with her tumultuous relationships, Catherine Cremnitz survived a lonely and illness-ridden childhood to be faced with even more complex indignities, familial and social, in her adult life. Mercurial, creative, thwarted, and with mental illness simmering beneath the surface, Catherine spins off course after yet another betrayal by a faithless man. The lives of her two daughters could have been counted among the considerable wreckage. The weight of feeling that it is your job to keep your mother alive is not easily shed, but Huisman's narrator, Violaine--Catherine's younger daughter--balances that burden with a recounting of the abandonments, assaults, betrayals, and disappointments which formed the beautiful and impetuous woman she and her sister, Elsa, adored. Violaine's attempt to understand Catherine's essential humanity (or, the Catherine who existed before she was Maman) relies upon the conflicting details shared by Catherine in her effort to convey her own story, but, as Violaine muses, "the truth of a life is the fiction that sustains it." Camhi's translation from the French of Huisman's debut novel conveys Violaine's steady compulsion to understand and explain interspersed with gorgeous details such as the way Catherine's cigarette-singed pillowcases resemble a target shot through by bullets. The names of Huisman's characters will provoke discussion of the novel as autofiction, but the story here is bigger than that. Love hurts; Huisman elegantly examines how and why.

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September 1, 2021
Originally published in France, The Book of Mother received several of the country's prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Fran�oise Sagan. Protagonist Violaine, who bears the same name as her author, begins the book by reminiscing about her childhood--specifically, the moment when her mother was first sent to a mental hospital. Catherine Cremnitz, otherwise known as Maman, was a tumultuous presence in her children's lives. Moody and dramatic, Maman was incapable of managing a household, but she loved Violaine and her sister with her whole heart. The girls vacillated between fear and passion for her. In the second part, Violaine explores her mother's entire life, from Catherine's birth as a sickly child to the love affairs that dominated her twenties. Finally, Violaine returns to the present and to her mother's current fate. Written like a long personal essay with little dialogue, Huisman's narrative will appeal to readers who are interested in biography and memoir. The European locale and exploration of mental illness may intrigue those who enjoyed Nicola DeRobertis-Theye's The Vietri Project (2021).

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