Author: Andy Bragen
Rating: 4 stars / 5 stars
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Favorite Quote: “Sometimes I like to think with my head down on the desk and as often as not my thinking turns to daydreaming turns into a full-fledged doze.” Bragen, Andy. This is My Office and Notes on My Mother’s Decline. E-book ed., Northwestern University Press, 2022.
Review: Thank you to the publisher, Northwestern University Press, and the NetGalley platform, that provided me with a free e-ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
I’ll be totally upfront here and note that I am not an expert in performance art. Nor does my background in English and creative writing provide much of a foundation for the literary art of drama pieces. So this review, perhaps more than most that I write, comes from the perspective of an uninformed and uneducated observer, and therefore can’t, and won’t, focus on structure or adherence to the art form. Really, this review is just about whether I liked it or not. And, spoiler alert, I did.
These two plays follow the arc of the main character, who appears to be the same person throughout both, as, in the first, he reflects on the life and death of his father, and, in the second, he follows the arc of his mother’s decline to her eventual death.
With regard to This is My Office, the narrator does an absolutely spectacular job of weaving in the more banal details of his office with the increasingly depressing memories he has of his father’s life as his father neared his death. In doing so, the narrator balances humor with grief, and with a level of storytelling the weaves the past with the present.
In the second play, there are two perspectives, marked for readers by plain text for the son and bolded text for the declining mother. The interplay between past and present is more subtle in this play, than in the first, but still the history between the two characters is critical for the present moment they find themselves in.
I’m interested in, and a bit confused by, why in the text, anytime the mother says a word that has a double “t,” for example, her nurse is named Loretta, both t’s are removed (ex. Loretta becomes “Lore a”). I’m curious what the purpose of that was, and how that might be accomplished on the stage.
About that Quote: I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about this other than this quote was incredibly relatable. I too am known to “just close my eyes for a moment” only to wake up three hours later, completely confused about my surroundings.
TW for this book: parent loss, descriptions of bodily functions/illness
Have you read This is My Office and Notes on My Mother’s Decline? Share your thoughts below!
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