My Mother's Island

by Marnie Mueller

In Marnie Mueller's My Mother's Island , Sarah Ellis must tend to her dying mother, Reba. This moving story of subterranean conflict between a mother and her only child explores the tension between duty and commitment—how to honor one's parents even when one feels damaged by them. With sorrow, rage, empathy, and touches of humor, the story reaches its irrevocable conclusion in a death scene where Sarah is shocked to find a simple truth that has always evaded her.
This novel is played out against the lush ambiance of the Caribbean and the embracing involvement of the people of the working class Puerto Rican community where Sarah's parents settled twenty years earlier. Sarah, who has always taken care of her mother's needs, has steeled herself to single-handedly provide support to her dying mother, but gradually allows other to help her—Lydia Rentas, the girlfriend of a local heroin user and the foster mother of a child whose own mother has AIDS; Estela, a neighbor across the street, whose carport is overflowing with orchids; Inez, whose four-year-old daughter has become the granddaughter Sarah has never provided her mother; Pearl, a former sports writer who is Reba's bridge partner; and Dr. Gold, a New Yorker who thirty years earlier married a Puerto Rican and has taken on Latino attitudes toward the process of dying. With their support, Sarah comes to terms with her mother and with her own past.

238 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

I was born in the Tule Lake Japanese American High Security camp in Northern California during WWII to Caucasian parents who had gone there to work to try to make a terrible situation tolerable for the people incarcerated there.

In 1963, I answered President Kennedy's call to "ask not what you country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." The very day I entered the Peace Corps was the day he was assassinated. I spent two years in Guayaquil, Ecuador living and working in an urban barrio. When I returned to the United States I worked as a community organizer in Spanish Harlem in New York City. I later produced rock and folk concerts and city-wide festivals, and served as the Program Director of WBAI-FM an alternative radio station in New York City.

In the 1980s, I began to write and published many short stories, essays, and poems in literary magazines, anthologies, and commercial venues. And in 1994, I published my first novel, GREEN FIRES, set in the rain forest of Ecuador, which drew on some of my Peace Corps experience, as well as documented the first incursions of oil companies into the region.

My second novel, THE CLIMATE OF THE COUNTRY, is set in the Tule Lake Camp and is loosely based on my parents' experiences working there.

MY MOTHER'S ISLAND, my third book, takes place in a small working class community in Puerto Rico. Though a novel, it closely follows the real story of my mother's death there and how the neighbors came in to help me help her to die.

I've been fortunate in that my novels have garnered many awards and notices. Anyone interested in learning more can go to my website at marniemueller.com.

I'm currently working on a non-fiction book about my relationship with a Japanese American showgirl who was interned in Minidoka Camp in Idaho during World War II.

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City with my husband, Fritz Mueller.

Reviews

[Rosalind Reisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a touching and intense examination of a fraught mother-daughter relationship; although it's fiction, it's very real, with beautifully drawn characters. I found I couldn't stop reading it for the truth of the psychological insight.

[Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dutiful daughter takes care of her mother during her dying days. Strictly out of duty, she does not love her mother but comes to understand her.

[Sue Gabianelli-danneker · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting resolution of a daughter's anguish over her relationship with her parents as she helps her mother die.

[Eileen]

A sad story of a daughter reconciling her differences and feelings toward a mother who had serious psychological issues. In the end, the daughter's compassionate, generous nature came through.

[Sandra Shwayder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marnie Mueller creates vivid and moving images of childhood as well as creating an authentic picture of the contemporary scene of her mother's neighborhood in Puerto Rico. The book is called a novel but is clearly a memoir. It is a compelling read (just finished last night) but left me wishing I could know a bit more about the author's own youth and the youth of her mother. She touches on it just enough to make the reader want to know more.

[Heidi]

Loneliness; separation between mother & daughter, coming together at her end of life. Learning to understand.