The protagonist of Jessica George’s Maame is Maddie Wright—a twenty-five year-old Black woman living in London. At the start of the book, she (as our first-person narrator) discloses that her father is in the advanced stages of a Parkinson’s diagnosis. With her mother and brother both occasionally unable—and more often unwilling—to assist, she serves as his primary caretaker alongside assistance from a professional carer. The book’s wheels are set in motion by her mother returning to London from a year-long stint in Ghana; with almost everyone in her life pushing her to move out and live a life that is more socially acceptable, she finds an open room to rent and throws herself into new situation after new situation.
And then her father dies.
The aftermath of his death is the foundation for the remainder of the book, and its effects on Maddie unfold around and within her. Prior to his death, she ruminates frequently on unhappiness that creates a fog around her—yet she is constantly reminded by her mother that things like this should be kept private. Things like her father’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, to which she lies about to a doctor when discussing back pain connected with lifting him in and out of bed, are private. So Maddie—referred to as Maame by her parents, a Twi word meaning “woman”—shoulders her family’s emotional and financial burdens on her own.
Shortly before I started this, I listened to the audiobook version of Crying in H Mart. Michelle Zauner’s memoir details her relationship with her mother, including the cancer diagnosis that would result in her death, as well as her identity as a Korean-American woman. Zauner’s writing is raw yet refined, and balances an almost poetic nature with its precision of language. My emotional response to her story was only heightened by hearing her narrate the audiobook herself, and there were multiple moments where the memories that were shared were too much for me to process all at once, and I had to pause the book to drive in silence for a few minutes.
When I first finished Maame, Zauner’s writing kept coming to mind as I tried to think of what I wanted to include in a review. There are some similarities, to be fair: the loss of a parent to a terminal disease, an emphasis on relationships with immigrant parents, the blending of cultures for first-generation children. But there’s also many differences, most notably being the genres. Zauner’s is a memoir, but George’s is fiction (though somewhat autobiographical). So where does the intersection of these two stories, in my mind, begin and end?
In November of 2021, my grandfather passed away from Alzheimer’s. I was living in Shanghai at the time—back when China was still enforcing closed borders as part of its zero COVID policy—and I hadn’t seen him since February, when I flew up to Baltimore while visiting the U.S. prior to the world falling apart. I had already planned to return to the States for our Lunar New Year vacation specifically to visit him, as I heard his condition was continuing to deteriorate, and I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to see him again.
During that weekend trip, I spent the first night (along with my father and sister) in my grandparents’ house. While I was in the bathroom preparing for bed, my grandfather tried to break through the door before being calmed down (I can’t remember by who) and led back to bed. The following day, I moved my things to my uncle’s house and spent the remaining night there.
My father and I took my grandfather on a walk around the neighborhood at one point, on a day when the sun made the cold weather bearable enough for us Floridians to withstand it. I asked my father to take a picture of us together, and he did; the sun was shining right into my eyes so I’m squinting pretty intensely, but it was at least one more picture together. A few minutes later, my grandfather announced that he wanted to go home but that he didn’t know where he was. When my dad tried to help him, my grandfather became agitated and threatened to hit him. I speed-walked back to the house and told my grandmother about the situation; she drove the car toward them and talked him into getting in with her.
On our last day in Maryland, ma group of us had lunch at Cracker Barrel before the three of us headed to the airport. I don’t remember what anyone ate, but I remember the last words I said directly to my grandfather before the meal ended and we took a handful of group pictures outside:
—“I love you, Grandpa.”
—“Grandpa?” *laughs* “Why are you calling me that?”
When I got the text from my father all those months later—simply “Grandpa has passed”, sent at 11:21 pm Shanghai time—my first thought was a sense of finally. We’d been seeing his condition erode for so long, and the updates that would be sent along—whether he had stopped eating, or had fallen and was at the hospital—were always accompanied by a sense of “Is this it?” My second thought was a replay of how I had spent that night: out with a new guy I was dating, us meeting up with one of my friends at a favorite wine bar, having a conversation about our new feelings for each other in the taxi ride back to his place. On the night my grandfather died, everything I did was centered around the new life I was building in Shanghai, one that was about me and this new person I was growing into. And I didn’t feel proud when I considered that—I felt shame.
The aftermath of my grandfather’s death wasn’t the same as Zauner’s or George’s loss of their parents, but grief manifests in many ways—and I felt that, on a deep-down, visceral, core level—while I listened and read through their books. The haunting nature of the shadow that lingers in place of the person you no longer have, and the sense that you are now untethered from the person you yourself used to be. A void exists where something integral to you used to be, and it is impossible to know how to fill it. It is impossible to fill it at all.
My grandfather will never know the person I am now (or even the person I was in the process of becoming at the time). His dementia evolved throughout the majority of my adult life, and it’s difficult for me to recall a time where I can separate him from it. He didn’t understand my stories about living overseas. He’ll never have seen me without me needing to wear my glasses. So much of my life exists as separate from him and his memory.
Everyone grieves in their own way, and the path toward acceptance can be a long one. One of the people in Maddie’s life tells her that the person you become after losing someone is always going to be different than how you were before. I know that’s true for me; the days that rolled into weeks and built up into months now equal a little over two years since I received the text from my father, and the person I was prior to it feels like like someone else. There is some overlap—I still like to read, and watch reality TV, and drink soda—but that death signaled a shift in many of my values. I chose to move back to Florida to be closer to my family; I eventually stopped drinking; I lost some of my close friends and gained ones who became even closer.
For both Zauner and George, their stories center around their relationships with mothers. Although it is Maddie’s father who dies, the grief that descends upon her family forces her and her mother (with whom she has always had a terse relationship) to confront some of their long-standing issues. And for Zauner, who details the time before, during, and after her mother’s diagnosis, the relationship between the two of them feels omnipresent throughout the entire book; there is no moment where her presence diminishes.
One of my favorite takeaways from both stories is that both Michelle and Maddie—one who is real, and one who is fictional—emerge from their experiences with a clearer understanding and appreciation for their relationships with their parents. Their writing describes conversations and moments of wisdom gained earlier that finally connects at some point later on. One specific moment that comes to mind now is when Maddie meets a man whose mother is Zimbabwean; her own once counseled her to find a partner who shared a similar background, as he would understand her better (though she also added not to filter out white men, as Maddie couldn’t afford to be picky at the advanced age of 25). Such seems to be the path for many first, or oldest, daughters.
Both stories are exceptionally written, and have a “full-circle” moment as they approach the ending. In stories about death, this is more than what may constitute a satisfying finale in other genres: it’s comforting, and feels needed, for stories where we know the mourning process is far from over. It adds weight to the life of the person who is now longer here, and makes you think that—maybe—it’s possible for all of our loved ones to exist beyond where our memories of them might end.
A few months before my grandfather passed, my grandmother asked me to write his eulogy. I approached this request with a sense of humor—how could I write a eulogy for someone still alive? I told my friends, and I’m sure I posted it on social media. But I didn’t write the eulogy.
Instead, one day I sat down at my office desk after work and I wrote a story based around the premise of having to write your grandfather’s eulogy. I barely remember the first draft, which was hastily written over the course of a couple hours, but it was a piece that I continued to work on over the coming weeks. In this fictional world, my second-person narrator is writing the eulogy following the immediate death of her grandfather. Like me, she is living overseas and unable to attend the funeral. Unlike me, she was able to visit more frequently before she moved. Unlike me, she had more time with him.
That short story—Grandpa’s Obituary—was published in October 2020. One month later, he passed away. I read and reread the story I had written in the days following, as if trying to convince myself that the feelings I had predicted I’d experience weren’t actually real but instead fictional. It, of course, didn’t work.
So when I read Jessica George’s acknowledgements at the end of Maame, and could see the parallels in her own life with Maddie’s, I thought about how I had done something similar for myself a few years ago. And Michelle Zauner’s book—though told more directly, as a memoir—shared similar sentiments as well. Their stories brought me a few more degrees of closure that I hadn’t previously realized were possible to obtain, but they also reopened some of these old feelings that I had carefully packed and packaged away.
Those feelings still exist in me, but they’re much more complex than they once appeared.