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In his preface, Gébler recounts how the knowledge of his mother's impending death began to feel "like a sore tooth to which the tongue keeps darting: it wouldn't let me alone" and so "I decided I should stick with the sore tooth. I would write about my experience of my mother's death. It was what I needed to do. Solipsistic of course, but it had to be done." That solipsism is also an act of narrative generosity. The emotions he describes are familiar to very many, and his acknowledgment of them a source of solace. They range from helplessness to anger, through anxiety and worry, back to rage. And even more powerfully, the memoir evokes O'Brien's rage against dying: "She would testify to the brutal truth and she did and terrible as it was to hear, it was also bracing. She wouldn't baulk; she would resist; she would cavil. Wasn't that the better way to face extinction, to say loudly over and over and over, 'No, no, no, it's hideous.'"
The No One Tells You memoir powerfully evokes O'Brien's rage against 'hideous' dying. For the writing son, the last years have been times of watching - his mother and himself - and of painful learning: ' Death, in this case (or do I mean her case?
) I was coming to understand, was less an event than a series of incremental reductions, with one capacity after another being taken away until at last, you came to the end - extinction. And like some wretched formula I needed for an examination but could not keep hold of in my mind, I had to keep relearning this, again and bloody again.
Edna O'brien Death Memoir Aging Writing
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