In ``It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks," Catherine Lloyd Burns writes lovingly and searingly about her difficult mother. Burns' s prose is terrifically engaging and unfailingly humorous. Which is not to say that the protagonist Burns is totally likable. She's human, in the best and worst sense of the word. To her credit, she knows as much. ``I am a slob ( I leave evidence of myself everywhere), I am rude (like my mother), I cut people off verbally and physically, I am mostly unaware of others and my impact on them." By not gilding this lily, she scores points with the reader.
Burns testifies to the difficulty of making peace and caring for her aged mother while raising an infant daughter. It is her devotion to her daughter that is at the very core of this book; Burns is a professional overcompensator, and this child will get everything she didn't -- plenty of parental involvement, plenty of attention, plenty of kudos, and plenty of Mom. Perhaps a little too much, which is another thing Burns is smart enough to acknowledge. Her anxieties about child rearing and her desire to protect and defend her child ring bells. As does her vivid picture of her mother, an intensely preoccupied, self-involved, direct woman who stands as a stark reminder of what can go wrong when a parent fails. Of course Burns's mother has her reasons, ones we sympathize with. She is a widow twice over with an extended family decimated during the Holocaust. However, sympathy is one thing, absolution another; though a mother myself, I found it hard to bestow the latter. As written, this woman is brittle, opinionated , and completely self-protective.
It is Burns' s role to figure her mother out, and make her separate peace, even as she rears her child and strives to make her marriage work. Her journey from troubled teenager to sitcom almost-star to Brooklyn mom and writer is entertaining and, better yet, insightful. This is a book that shows the reader what family really means, and how raising a child of your own can offer insight, patience, and, best of all, the capacity to forgive.
