A Mother's Story - Hardcover

Vanderbilt, Gloria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679450521 ISBN 13: 9780679450528

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

On a summer day in 1988, Carter Cooper, aged 24, dropped to his death from the 14th-floor terrace of his mother's New York City's apartment. Now, seven years later, Gloria Vanderbilt is finally able to set down the terrible events of that afternoon--to which she was a witness--in a book of overwhleming intensity, feeling, and beauty.

About this title

Review:

In 1988, Gloria Vanderbilt's 23-year-old son Carter committed suicide. As Vanderbilt looked on, Carter swung away from the terrace wall of her 14th-floor New York apartment and, in Vanderbilt's words, "He let go." In this poignant memoir, Vanderbilt reflects on her own painful history and what she describes as "the final loss, the fatal loss that stripped me bare." She thought, she says, that she could not survive the death of her son. This memoir is a testimony to her courage and her own return to life.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A poignant and painful memoir of a son's suicide--the dark side of Mother's Day. At one point in this brief volume, Vanderbilt (The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull, 1994) says of herself, ``There's a place deep inside me that is hard as a diamond.'' It would have to be to survive not only the traumas of Vanderbilt's childhood (described in 1985's Once Upon a Time), but the sudden death of her husband Wyatt Cooper when their two sons were still young, and the death of her son Carter at age 24. The story begins as a celebration of the family that Gloria and Wyatt Cooper built together. The narrative is interspersed with diary entries recalling an idyllic family summer at the beach, with eulogies from Carter's brother and friends, and a prescient poem by Carter. Even after their father's death, the boys escape the spoiled rich kid syndrome. Carter finishes college, gets a job, falls in love, all the while impressing his peers as ``pure'' and ``good.'' On the day he dies, Carter does move back to his mother's house, exhibiting somewhat curious but not worrisome behavior. Waking from a long afternoon nap, Carter is at first disoriented and then, in an aberrant act, he races to the terrace of the apartment, climbs on its rampart and sits there before dropping to his death on the street below. His mother tries desperately to reach him, to talk him back down off the ledge, to recall him to sanity, to no avail. Vanderbilt relives that day and those moments again and again, in therapy, with her friends, and in the sorrowful letters she writes to Carter. Slowly she begins to heal--that is her message--but she will never be the same. A sometimes clumsy structure only underlines the remarkable intensity of feeling that Vanderbilt conveys. The reader will bear the weight of her sorrow, even after the book is closed. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679450521
• ISBN 13: 9780679450528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144