Phantoms

Phantoms begins with a literal phantom: an olfactory hallucination that Rima follows for years while she writes an intimate memoir of motherhood, memory and mind. The book traces four generations of women: a great-grandmother with a cigar, a flask of rum and a deck of cards; a grandmother of formidable intellect and early death; another, strict and secretive, who raises the author; and, most present and least understood, the strange and estranged mother—luminous, wounding, timid, playful—wh...