28 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020LET’S FACE IT:You don’t read a memoir
about aging parents with health issues for
the suspense. Or even the instruction. Be-
cause if this happens to you, why would
you need any? You’re a grown woman with
common sense, Grade A organizational
skills and a Girl Scout’s zeal to tackle the
task at hand. You’ve got this!
Then one year, two years, eight years,
pass.
So much for zeal. You need company.
Elizabeth Berg’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” is a
good place to start. In 2010 her father’s
health is failing and she and her sister,
Vicki, lobby their parents to leave their
Minnesota home for a facility that offers
assisted living. (Another sibling lives in
Hawaii — every family has one of these,
even if “Hawaii” is down the block.) Art, 89,
a former military man, and Jeanne, 88,
have been married for 67 years. These
days, Art has macular degeneration, de-
pression and incipient Alzheimer’s. Jeanne
has had enough. He asks her the same
questions endlessly. He suspects someone
is stealing from them. He wants breakfast,
forgetting he’s already eaten it.
Berg, who lives in Chicago, runs back
and forth while Vicki, who is local, shoul-
ders the daily burden. “My mother has
come into some anger,” Berg writes. “My
father is confused. He takes her anger per-
sonally as it is sometimes intended, and he
doesn’t know what he has done wrong.”
This is doubly hurtful since Berg describes
him as “besotted” with his wife: “Where’s
your mother? I have heard this question all
my life. It is like a brain tattoo, my father
wanting to know where my mother is, be-
cause he wants her near him always.”
The siblings prevail on moving and pre-
dictably, Jeanne hates the place: “I know
my mother has suffered mightily,” Berg
writes. “My father has left her before he
has left her.” She adds, “And we don’t help,
we children, with the way we side with one
of them, then the other; and now it is his
turn to have us on his side and we are vili-fying her because when we have someone
to blame, all of this is less painful for us.”
“ ‘Why do you think that doctor wants to
have a family meeting next?’ my mother
asked.
“ ‘Maybe because everything that’s hap-
pening to you guys is happening to all of
us,’ I said.
“And she said, ‘Oh.’ ”
In the happening-to-all-of-us category,
Berg, a novelist, whose observations are
keen and whose writing is its own pleas-
ure, makes a curious choice. Except for a
handful of Jeannes and Arts, she refers to
her parents almost exclusively as “my
mother” or “my father.” A hallmark of de-
mentia is that the person knowshe or she is
disappearing in real time. They experience
that anguish daily. Why rob these charac-
ters of their names, their identities in the
world? Perhaps she needed to keep them
remote, fixed at a distance, as she seems to
have always experienced them. After they
die, she writes: “I saw that whenever I was
looking at them, I was seeing only the tip of
the iceberg. They belonged to each other
more than they belonged to us.”
But that is always the way, no matter what
kind of marriage your parents had. Delu-
sions of adulthood aside, you, the child, are
never in charge, really. You make your bestguess, as they did before you. For you.
Berg imagines her parents coming back,
her mother offering advice. Why not? For
better or worse, parents return. Though
they never stay. Robert Frost, she recalls,
“said that everything he had learned about
life could be summed up in three words: It
goes on.” 0Assisted Living
The author’s parents were always a unit — until they needed help.
By ALEX WITCHEL
I’LL BE SEEING YOU
A Memoir
By Elizabeth Berg
212 pp. Random House. $27.
ALEX WITCHEL’Smost recent book is “All Gone:
A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia. With
Refreshments.”
SCAN THE BOOK JACKETSof many contem-
porary memoirs and you will find the
words “brave,” “honest” and “raw,” often
followed by “redemptive.” But these re-
duce the art form to confession, as if little
more than a diary into which the writer has
spilled her guts. I’m reminded of writing
advice from Annie Dillard: “You may not
let rip.” At its best, memoir is an act of con-
summate control. The writer hasn’t just
survived her trials and tribulations. She
has transcended them enough to craft
them into a story.
Christie Tate’s “Group” is one of those
rare memoirs that can be accurately de-
scribed as honest and raw, and I don’t en-
tirely mean that as a compliment. As a
young law student, Tate suffers from terri-
ble loneliness and a self-loathing that
manifests in a variety of ways. She
struggles with a longtime eat-
ing disorder, chooses unavail-
able men, has trouble with in-
timacy of any kind. “I wished
passively for death,” she
writes, “but I didn’t stockpile
pills or join the Hemlock Soci-
ety’s mailing list. I didn’t re-
search how to get a gun or fash-
ion a noose out of my belts. I didn’t
have a plan, a method or a date.
But I felt an unease, constant as
a toothache. It didn’t feel nor-
mal.” Tate is first in her law school class, an
accomplishment that only sinks her fur-
ther into despair. She imagines an empty
future defined by billable hours, a legal ca-
reer as “culturally approved-of beard for
my dismal personal life.”
A friend tells Tate about Dr. Jonathan
Rosen, a therapist who is Jewish and Har-
vard-educated (I mention this only be-
cause much is made of his ethnicity and
pedigree) and whose highly unconvention-
al psychological methods involve grouptherapy in which radical honesty is the
rule. Both inside the group and out, pa-
tients are allowed to disclose what goes on.
Sexual hang-ups and habits, bodily
functions or dysfunctions, obses-
sions, affairs, all are fair game.
Into this mix marches Tate,
whose fear of being truly
seen and known is even
greater, at first, than her
fear of sucking at relation-
ships and her fear of dying
alone. Rosen’s unusual tech-
nique includes what he calls
“prescriptions.” After Tate con-
fesses to the group that she’d
eaten seven apples the night
before, Rosen asks her to call
another group member every evening and
recount exactly what she’d eaten that day.
“The apples aren’t killing you,” he tells her.
“The secrecy is.”
Herein lies the greatest strength of this
raw and honest memoir. We witness, up
close, a young woman as she takes halting,
awkward baby steps toward becoming
herself. It’s a process, and it isn’t pretty. As
Tate’s ties to Rosen and his groups deepen
(yes, plural; at one point she is in two
groups and attends sessions three time aweek), as she speaks aloud her most
shameful secrets and realizes that no one
has shunned her, she slowly becomes ten-
derized, and her heart — she had been so
sure it was defective — begins to open,
both to herself and others.
But ultimately "Group” is a bit unsure of
what it wants to be. Tate’s language is at
times lyrical, as in a description of the af-
termath of a childhood tragedy; at other
times, her breezy tone has a reductive, sit-
com-ish quality and her descriptions veer
into stereotype. Rosen’s Jewishness is un-
derscored with mazel tovs and mamelahs,
his wiry grayish hair “slightly reminiscent
of Einstein.” She describes being with her
new love, the man who will become her
husband (not a spoiler! Remember re-
demption?), as “like eating a perfectly
seared piece of arctic char, rosemary
roasted potatoes and grilled asparagus.
Filling, tasty, nourishing.” Future husband
as arctic char, complete with sides. Still,
Tate’s hard-won willingness to become lov-
ing and to be loved ultimately shapes a
story that has a lot of heart — one that goes
straight to the messy center of what it
means to interrogate our own limitations
and deepest desires, wherever that jour-
ney may take us. 0In It Together
A memoir of life in group therapy.
By DANI SHAPIRO
GROUP
How One Therapist and a Circle of
Strangers Changed My Life
By Christie Tate
288 pp. Avid Reader Press. $27.
DANI SHAPIROis the author of five novels and
five memoirs, including “Inheritance.” She is
also the host of Family Secrets, a podcast.
Christie TateElizabeth Berg with her parents and brother
in 1956, when she was 7.PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: VIA ELIZABETH BERG; MARY RAFFERTY PHOTOGRAPHY