Night, Ma | Elizabeth Knox

For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.  In time, she was able to write about it.

Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires.  Knox is a beloved storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own.

With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences. Night, Ma offers the gift of seeing as Elizabeth sees.

'Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.' —Diana Wichtel  'An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.' —Noelle McCarthy