The Night Garden: Of My Mother by Sandra Tyler
I absolutely loved it. I couldn’t put this book down.
Few stories shatter my heart as completely as Sandra Tyler’s The Night Garden: Of My Mother — and I absolutely loved it. I couldn’t put this book down. I became so wrapped up in Tyler’s memoir that I found myself crying multiple times, utterly moved by her vivid and heart-wrenching portrayal of the complex layers of motherhood and daughterhood, and what it’s like to watch someone you love slowly disappear.
The Night Garden is the story of a woman watching the slow deterioration of her aging mother’s mind and body, connecting the woman she saw now with the woman of her memories.
In a way, Tyler loses her mother — herself becoming the caregiver, the motherly figure — but in another way, she discovers something new. Something that was always there but was covered up by the title of “mother.” A woman. An artist. A soul that boldly faced life with a smile.
Unraveling the Complex Layers of Motherhood
There are always crises in motherhood … But I wasn’t prepared for this, what it now meant to be a middle-aged mother with an aging mother of my own.
Part of what makes The Night Garden so captivating is how it naturally flows through the lives of these two women. While rooted during her mother’s late 80s and early 90s, when her health took a drastic decline, the story frequently drifts along with the author’s memories. Tyler doesn’t restrain her story with a typical linear narrative, instead flowing from one aspect of their lives to another, following a cohesive train of thought.
At the same time, we witness the author fulfilling two roles simultaneously — as a daughter struggling to help her mother, and as a mother of her own young children. These moments are particularly hectic, highlighting how out-of-control her life must have felt. Her mother’s frantic phone calls while children bombarded her with questions; getting a call from the hospital when she needed to pick up the kids from school; helping her mother down to the lake shore while making sure her youngest didn’t float away with the current.
Tyler becomes a mother of two generations, both for her children and her mother. We also see Tyler’s mother in relationship to her own mother, a woman who couldn’t understand her as a painter, or appreciate the bold, abstract beauty of her “Night Garden.” The author really digs into this dynamic, revealing the complicated role of motherhood and how one generation drastically affects the next.
Painting the Scene with Breathtaking Prose
The author unravels these intergenerational relationships layer by layer in breathtaking exposition, painting the scenes of her mother’s cluttered house and her idyllic lakeside childhood with the same clarity and care. She unravels her and her mother’s relationship as though she herself is just beginning to understand it.
By the end of the book, Tyler’s mother has passed, and Tyler is admitted to a psychiatric ward. Throughout the story, we get glimpses of what’s to come, reminders of the inevitable ending, but it’s here where she finally begins to process her grief. And I felt myself grieving with her.
In The Night Garden, Sandra Tyler manages to capture the raw, unbridled emotional turmoil of losing a loved one. Particularly a parent, who has stood as guardian and mentor since the moment a child is born.
But in those final years, through all the heartache and frustration and grief, Tyler was able to see a different side of her mother. Not as her mother, but as a person.
Tyler was inherently bound to her mother by the same cord that ties all daughters to their mothers. But they were connected by more than this bond — as writer and painter. As two women “wrestling with that inner obsession of artists: to be understood. To be known.” In sharing her story, I think we’ve all come to know her well.
Sandra Tyler is the author of Blue Glass, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and After Lydia, both published by Harcourt Brace. Her memoir The Night Garden: of My Mother is forthcoming this spring from Pierian Springs Press. She is the founder and editor in chief of the renowned literary and fine art magazine, The Woven Tale Press. She was the recipient of fellowships to The McDowell Colony and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and a grant from the New York Public Library “Writers on Writing—Literary Legacies: Women in the Twentieth Century”. She was a 2013 BlogHer.com Voices of the Year. She earned her BA from Amherst College, and her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, NY; Wesleyan University, CT; and Manhattanville College, NY.
Publish Date: 10/23/2024
Genre: Memoir, Nonfiction
Author: Sandra Tyler
Page Count: 288 pages
Publisher: Pierian Springs Press
ISBN: 9781953136770
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