Wishing for Snow

An award-winning author's memoir of her mother's mental illness reveals her mother as an artist and a mother struggling with the loss of her sanity.

In this brave and beautifully composed tribute to her mother, Minrose Gwin accomplishes something rare in the craft of the memoir: not merely a record of a devastating mother-daughter relationship but a redemptive act of artistic witness. In telling the story of her mentally ill poet mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, Gwin looks to the past and future of a Southern family, exploring personal and cultural malaise while also envisioning the person her mother longed to be—the Erin Taylor that Minrose Gwin never knew.

Erin Taylor wasn't always insane. Her childhood diary from 1930 reveals a cheerful, observant Mississippi girl who steadfastly wished for snow, though, as she wrote, "usually it didn't come. And when it came it didn't stick." As she progressed from a dreamy college student to a young divorcee mother who then remarried, grew middle aged, and began to write and publish poetry, Erin Taylor spiraled deeper and deeper into the psychosis that eventually defined her existence, until her death from ovarian cancer. With searing insight into this difficult life, and compelling introspection into her own relationship with Erin, Gwin searches for her mother amid the poetry, letters, recipes, traffic tickets, newspaper clippings, medical reports, and quixotic lists she left behind.

"Gwin s courageous frankness . . . fully engages the reader, and this is definitely a real-life story we all need to hear." — Booklist