When Scott Simon began tweeting pain, love and conversation from his mother’s deathbed in an intensive-care unit in July 2013, he turned personal grief into collective emotion. Sharing painful moments and insights — “I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way” — Simon broke ground in the uses of social media. He was alone with his mother for most of those days at the hospital. Yet millions sat vigil with him, sobbing and laughing at the life and wisdom of 84-year-old Patricia Lyons Simon Newman.
Now, with “Unforgettable,” Simon reveals not the possibilities of social media but its limits. However intimate those 140-character bursts, they seem inadequate compared with the skilled unspooling of this memoir about growing up alongside his mother in their beloved Chicago and of caring for her in the final breaths.
Simon, host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” has not just filled in the story — he has told a new one. His tweets were about a man’s love for his mother in the face of inevitable death; his book is about a mother’s love for her son in the face of unavoidable loneliness.
“My mother was glamorous,” Simon explains. She modeled for hairspray and Chevys; she worked in nightclubs and dated mobsters; she sold clothes at upscale Michigan Avenue shops; she was an ad agency receptionist in the “Mad Men” era. At the same time, “my mother was a Working Girl,” he writes. She was divorced and single; she and Simon shared a cramped one-bedroom apartment; she skipped meals for herself so she could make the rent, give her boy plenty of snacks and throw him James Bond-themed birthday parties.
She did it on her own because her former husband, Simon’s father, had been a comedian intent on drinking himself to death. They had a “reckless kind of romantic kamikaze love,” Simon recalls, but there had come a moment when Patti had to leave, and take Scott, if they were to survive. Instead, she filled their lives with truly great friends and mostly good men.
Patti’s female friends — Simon’s “aunties” — were hostesses, dancers, lounge singers, women linked by their “mistakes, good times, lonely nights and hard-won laughs.” Simon recalls the sights, sounds and smells of their impromptu parties: “evenings with lots of snorts and laughs, olives and cheddar cheese on rye crackers, the stroke of matches, the tinkle of ice, compact makeup mirrors folded with a snap, high heels under the coffee table, crinkled cocktail napkins with lipstick smudges, earrings pulled out and resting on a coaster, Tony Bennett on the turntable.”
These women taught him to be a “classy guy” — perhaps because they’d met more than a few classless ones. “They passed what they learned on to me,” Simon writes. “They gave me something to steer toward.”
Patti married twice more, an Irish mother with three Jewish husbands. After Simon’s father died came a Lincoln scholar, whom she outlived, and a retired furniture executive, whom she did not. In between, Patti attracted plenty of attention. “For most of my boyhood,” Simon recalls, “my mother was unmarried, pretty, funny, and popular.”
This book is about family secrets revealed — not because they don’t matter anymore, but because a moment arrives when they’re all that matter and secrecy no longer does.
As Patti slips her bonds, she speaks out: “Help. Me.” Simon leaps from his mat. “In that horrifying and exquisite moment, I held my mother as I have held my own children. I tried to look without blinking into her bottomless brown eyes. I told her, ‘I’m here. Look at me. Give me everything. Every fear, every pain. Leave them with me. I’m your son.'”
This is when you realize that the tears have been flowing for some time, easing your way through a book that matches its title.
MEMOIR: GLAMOUR MOM
Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime
by Scott Simon (Flatiron)
