The Bad Daughter by Julie Hilden. 210 pages; hardcover; $17.95. 590 words

Julie Hilden's mother was unpredictable, irrational, alcoholic. As a child, Julie quickly learned to stay out of the way by escaping to her room to study. At 17, she would leave her mother forever for the security and support offered to her by Harvard. "This," Hilden writes, "is the story of my leaving and what it took from me."

In "The Bad Daughter," a biographical confession, Hilden discovers, only as an adult, that her mother had been very slowly succumbing to early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which was possibly the root cause of her mother's frustration and the reason she self-medicated with alcohol.

Hilden occasionally called her mother from Harvard but did not visit. Even when her mother's speech gradually became strange and senseless, Hilden did not attempt to go home to see her or even to find help. Eventually the mother's sister committed her to a nursing home, where she stayed until she died, receiving only one visit from her daughter--then only when she was in a speechless, uncomprehending state.

Reborn as an attorney, Hilden constructed a perfect life for herself, one with no past and no embarrassing mother. Like a drug addict numbing herself to the misery of existence, Hilden slept a Cinderella sleep, sequestering herself at work throughout her mother's suffering and encroaching illness. Her only knowledge of her mother's condition came through letters, calls, and photos from the aunt who called her "a bad daughter." Hilden enacted this label, not only by ignoring her mother, but through compulsive acts of repetition--she continually betrayed lovers, as she had betrayed her mother so early in life.

In the end, it is up to the reader to judge the depth of Julie Hilden's "badness." Other reviewers have called this book "unapologetic," yet that's a simplification. Objective is a better word: though Hilden does not immerse her narrative in shame and grief, clearly the author's emotions are complex. At some point, I grew frightened by her even tone, wondering when the screaming was going to begin and whether it would stop. Screaming, however, is not what Hilden wants the reader to hear. At one level, "The Bad Daughter" is a tribute to her unnamed mother. Hilden reconstructs her mother's youth, acknowledges her mother's efforts toward independent life, and attempts to draw a complete picture of a complete person. I'd like to think Hilden's mother would be proud of her daughter for getting away from a suffocating situation, and understand that her daughter's leaving was not a question of choice but of survival.

In the "The Bad Daughter," Hilden confronts the American ideal of self-construction and independence: the cleansed soul, the self-made, the inviolable prosecutor. There is no new land, new life, new personality that can be earned, no jungle to emerge from, rich: "Even as I try to re-create myself, the past recaptures me."

Keeping pain at bay through work, with its emphasis on order and logic, is a time-honored coping mechanism. However, her "mimicry of wholeness" finally does not rescue her soul and she must go home again, back to her earliest connection with her mother. Writing this book was, for Hilden, a way to become an honest and authentic person.

This frank and brave book is small, like a gift book, and Hilden likely intends it as a gift for her mother ("much too late") as well as for those who, like her, spent their childhood narcotized by books, relationships, food, overacheivement, or other drugs, waiting to escape.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.