A Sorrow Beyond Dreams : A Life Story

This slim volume (76 pages) is an author's attempt to process his mother's suicide. It ends up being both the story of his mother's life, and more generally, about what it was like to be a poor woman in Germany, living through World War II and its aftermath. About a woman's sense of identity or lack thereof in a pre-feminist society. But mostly it is a book about grief. The reader is constantly reminded that this is not so much a biography of his mother as it is a way to deal with his loss, to try to gain perspective and distance from his pain and from the memory of his mother. Of course it doesn't work as he hopes that it would. But that's what makes it moving. That's what saves the book from his attempted detachment from the specifics of his mother.