Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzheimer's, Machine Tools, and Laughter by Elinor Fuchs

by Elinor Fuchs

"At a time when such things were rare, Elinor Fuchs's mother, Lil, escaped a miserable marriage, took back her maiden name, left young Elinor to be raised by grandparents, and launched a career that led her from the Midwest to Washington, D.C. Rejoining her as an adolescent, Elinor watched as Lil traveled the world selling automotive parts and military gear, gave fabulous parties, and "in any given room, took up all the air there was." With her stunning looks and drive for success, Lil was a figure to admire, not a mother to love. Elinor determined to despise her mother's values and, once in college, to keep her distance." Making an Exit is the moving account of what happened afterward, during the final years of Lil's life. Following her mother's diagnosis with Alzheimer's, Fuchs finds herself the caretaker. As the disease progresses, she becomes her mother's mother, dressing her, bathing her, feeding her - all with growing compassion. Lil changes, filled with new warmth, the word love now regularly crosses her lips. And through the fantastic poetry in the disintegration of Lil's language, mother and daughter make a surprising new start.

Genres: Memoir, Biography

Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[John Thorndike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starting with its antic subtitle (A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzheimer’s, Machine Tools, and Laughter), this memoir keeps a light tone. This fits the personality of the author’s mother, an unstoppable 84-year-old, Lillian Kessler, who while confused is also lively. “She was not impossible,” Fuchs writes, because “she was cruel or cold. She was impossible because there was so much of her.”

Kessler charms the attendants at her nursing home, and us, and eventually even her resentful daughter. She makes for a good subject, especially because of how colorfully she mangles the language. So many dementia patients are depressed, retiring, even wordless. Not Lillian Kessler, whose outbreaks of “word salad” dot the book, and are quoted at the start of each chapter. “Oh, I’m in a dedeford,” she says. “They’re having a bedurz. I mean, they’re having a cressit.”

This is fun, but the emotional heart of the book is how the author gradually overcomes her resentment of a mother whose focus was so often elsewhere when she was growing up. After caring for her mother through ten years of what Fuchs calls the Emergency, she is able to say, “The last ten years: they were our best.”

A decent read---but there are so many better-written Alzheimer's memoirs, by John Bayley, Eleanor Cooney, Annie Ernaux, Elizabeth Cohen, Julie Hilden and Virginia Stem Owens, to name some that I recommend.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and honest, this book has a lot to say explicitly and implicitly about this mother/daughter relationship and about death. Alzheimer's disease is the third party in this gradually unfolding tale of love and connection. Although I have known the author for 60 years the book was revealing to me of much that I did not know.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a funny and poignant memoir that captures the indelible connection between mother and daughter, Elinor Fuchs draws upon the surprisingly most meaningful 10 years spent with her mother, Lil, once diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Lillian Kessler epitomizes that larger-than-life character who dominates any space she is in, be it her international business ventures with machine parts as a single mother in the 1940s or when she’s 84 years old and the life of the party in the Chevy Chase assisted-living home in spite of Alzheimer’s. She is a truly special character, but what ramifications does this very antithesis to the cult of domesticity have on a young child?

This is what Elinor Fuchs, her daughter and the author of Making an Exit recalls, and her mother’s deterioration of memory runs parallel to Elinor’s own recollection of her childhood memories. An absentee mother for most of Elinor’s childhood, Lil always had a rocky relationship with her daughter. “She was impossible,” Elinor would recall of her mother. Impossible to understand, perhaps impossible to love. Yet despite these impossibilities, their mother-daughter relationship becomes transcendent by the end of the novel.

Making an Exit is a fast read. The dialogue is snappy and rapid-fire, a strength that Fuchs has transferred well from her playwriting experience. Because her mother was dramatic to the max, I cringed WHEN THERE WOULD BE STRINGS OF DIALOGUE IN ALL CAPS. It was far from subtle, to say the least, and jolted me out of the narrative. Fuchs doesn’t shy away from detailing out the filamentous, often incomprehensible, conversations as Lil lost her coherence. This is a very real result of Alzheimer’s but definitely hard to stomach. Long passages of conversation simply made no sense, and it made for a confusing and less enjoyable read.

Lil Kessler is memorable in her own right, but even though the novel has valuable snippets on aging and intergenerational aging, this is not a memoir I think I will come back to regarding Alzheimer's.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This book made me believe even more that someone with dementia, while sharing common symptoms of the disease, still retains his or her basic personality. Imagine! This mother was actually happy to move into Assisted Living, and the nursing home was just fine with her, too!

I think it is as my sister said: Dementia may affect people differently much as drinking does. Some are "mean drunks," and some are "happy drunks."

[Timothy]

loved this book.....enjoyed her humor during a very stressful, painful and emotional time in her life....the loss of her mother to Alzheimer