Subtitled: The Phantom Alice Miller--The Real Person
Nonfiction by Martin Miller
Alice Miller was a Holocaust survivor who was born in Poland as Alicja Englard and lived through the German Occupation war years under the name Alicja Rostawska in order to hide her Jewish identity. She went on to earn a doctoral degree in psychology and to write several extremely influential books on the subject. I have only read a small amount of her writing personally, but I found in amazingly insightful.
In this book, her son Martin attempts to unravel the tragic mystery of how it is possible that Alice Miller, so kind and compassionate to patients and readers for many decades, was actually a neglectful and abusive parent to him and his sister. The only answer is that, like most of us, she simply could not escape her own life experiences, regardless of her intellectual ability. Alice was not capable of being a loving mother after what she had endured, and Martin is trying desperately in writing this book to understand that fact and forgive her shortcomings.
This was not an enjoyable book to read, and it had some stylistic problem as as well. The story itself is incredibly interesting, but (like most memoir writers) the author doesn't tell it in an interesting way. He casually reveals a whopper of a twist at the end, almost as an afterthought. I think Alice's true story would make a great book in the right hands, but this memoir is really about Martin and not his mother, whatever he intended.
