“Beautiful in a Human Way”: George Hodgman Goes Home

Join George Hodgman — whose new memoir Bettyville is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection  and Heller McAlpin for a conversation Tuesday, March 10, at Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side Manhattan store.

Who says you can’t go home again? When longtime book and magazine editor George Hodgman was squeezed out of his job at the publishing house for which he’d given his all, he retreated to his hometown of Paris, Missouri, (population 1,248). He was determined to help his 90-year-old mother, who, with encroaching dementia and vision problems, could no longer live alone – and figure out what was next for both of them. Bettyville, a chronicle of his first few months as “an unlikely guardian” and “care inflictor,”  is a remarkable, gutsy memoir – laugh-out-loud funny one moment, tender and moving the next. It is at once a loving tribute to an indomitable woman, a coming-out tale, a recovery saga, and an elegy for dying small-town culture. But it is above all an ode to kindness and caring.

Clinging to her independence, her dignity, and her home – not to mention her favorite tattered sandals and shabby flannel nightgown — Betty Baker Hodgman, however vulnerable, is “not easy to corral,” her son writes. “Her will remains at blast-force strength.” Their ad hoc, bickering and bantering household is a sitcom-worthy odd couple arrangement.

Hodgman, an only child, grew up adoring his sweet, easygoing father and high-strung, fashionable mother, but he’d fled the repressive confines of the Midwest right after high school, knowing there was no place for “his kind” – the local code for homosexuals. He had always had a joshing relationship with his feisty mother, though they maintained a wary silence on the big stuff – including his sexuality. He had never felt comfortable discussing who he really was, afraid of hurting or disappointing his parents. But he comes to realize that he and his mother share a perfectionist drive and a sense of never being quite right. For years, Hodgman’s default mode was coverup – deflecting intimacy with wit and irony, workaholism, and drugs. His mother’s was no nonsense, constant motion — and silence.

Bettyville is filled with snappy, often self-deprecating humor. “I have been called emotionally unavailable. I prefer to think of myself as merely temporarily out of stock,”  Hodgman writes. He mocks his culinary skills and confesses, “A month ago I thought the Medicare doughnut hole was a breakfast special for seniors.” A recovered drug addict, he’s frank and funny about his cravings for pharmaceutical uplift. Among the offerings at an All Town Yard Sale he finds “pills organizers I am tempted to lick for crumbs.” When he takes his mother to visit Tiger Place, an assisted living facility, “she glared at me as if being sold into white slavery…Clearly I am, in her mind, the Joan Crawford of elder care.”

But Bettyville is so much more than a laughfest. Hodgman’s empathy for his mother is palpable. Despite his declaration that “Caring for things – flowers or people – has never been my strong point,” this is a man who spreads a dryer-warmed towel around his mother’s feet to warm her in bed  – appendages about which he remarks, “The sight of her bare feet was enough to suggest that life is just too tough, but they are survivors, these old codgers, and beautiful in their human way.”   In response to friends’ advice that he move Betty into assisted living, he writes, “I get what makes sense; I just can’t bear to do it. I cannot imagine the sorrow of dragging her out of this house.”  Then he lightens the mood with another quip: “Maybe I can convince her she’s on a long cruise.”

Hodgman’s book is powerful because he takes such big risks, not just by putting his life on hold to care for his mother, but by bravely exposing his insecurities and difficulties and following the dictum he learned in rehab: “You must always, always tell the truth.”  Inspired and humbled by his mother’s stalwart, uncomplaining refusal to give up even after a lymphoma diagnosis, he discovers his own unsuspected strength and rises to the considerable challenges of her care, “because sometimes, at least once, everyone should see someone through. All the way home.”

And as if that weren’t achievement enough, he’s also written this beautiful book.