“This is a grim, tough, powerful, and beautiful book, the memoir of a genuine heroine, whose struggle against the calamities that beset her — beginning with the wounds inflicted by a remote coldhearted father and a pathetically helpless mother and ending with the anguish of a wrecked marriage, the mother’s suicide, and the author’s own fatal illness — was waged with enormous intelligence and fortitude, and even with flair. At the heart of the book — and depicted with pitiless candor — is the tortuous bond of love between mother and daughter. That at the end of her brief life, Janet Hobhouse could transform her suffering into a confession so precise and evocative and singularly unselfpitying, so strangely full of verve, strikes me as a considerable moral as well as literary achivement.” — Philip Roth
“A stunning heartbreaker of a book, shot through with pellucid sadness…[an] extraordinary last book in which [Hobouse’s] pain is as insistent—and lustrous—as her craft.” — Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times
“[A] sad, beautiful—and profoundly affecting—meditation on love and death and family.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“A sort of Jamesian journey through the labyrinth of the narrator’s consciousness, a finely tuned, highly intelligent, witty, self—examining and haunted instrument…This is an intense tale, told at fever pitch. Grab your hat and hang on for the ride.” — The Boston Globe
“Hobhouse traces the rise and fall of a family’s fortunes by focusing on its women, on the wives and mothers who might be consigned to the margins of the official story.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review
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