'Everything happens at once' in the year charted by Jayne Anne Phillips in MotherKind - her heroine Kate becomes and loses a mother. The book records tiny actions and reactions: Kate changes baby Tatie's nappy and her mother's sickroom flowers, spoonfeeds mashed-up banana to one and morphine to the other. She lives in an eternal present: 'her childhood past had washed away from her, and the more recent past, between home and Matthew, was gone too. Nothing but now: her mother and Tatie in the blue armchair.'

LRB 22 February 2001 | PDF Download