A Good Enough Daughter: A memoir

This relatively short (254 pages) memoir is outstanding in the way Shulman reviews her life and learns more about those of her parents as she cleans out the home they lived in for forty years (after moving both of them to an assisted-living facility) in the prosperous suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. She finds old letters she has written to her parents and they have written to each other. She re-explores the rooms and furnishings of the house she grew up in, couldn't wait to leave after high school graduation, and finally returns to. So well does she describe her parents that by the end of the book, following both their deaths at the retirement home, I was weeping myself, and missing her sensuous, vivacious mother, and matter-of-fact, judicious, loving father. The weakness of the book is that her relationship with her brother (actually a cousin her parents adopted after his mother died following childbirth) is very poorly described. We are told they have not had a close relationship as adults, but, aside from one episode of friction the author relates, we do not know why. When her brother dies of lung cancer, she regrets their distant relationship, but does not seem to have done much to nurture a better one while he was living.