A BIG BEAUTIFUL WARDROBE, A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE BOOK

I'm always a little envious of people who write really short books that are really good. Jeannette Montgomery Barron's My Mother's Clothes: An Album of Memories is one of those books...the kind that tempts you to say something like "I could have written that," except that you didn't.

Barron writes on her website: "I originally thought of photographing my mother’s clothes as a project exclusively for her, to help spark her memories from the past; she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The project worked; my mother and I looked together at the photographs I had taken and she would remember parts of her past...As [it] progressed and my mother slipped further away, I started concentrating on the small details; her sketches and notes made in her address book (like haikus,), a lipstick kiss on the back of a clothing tag, mounds of costume jewelry. I suppose this project became my way of coping with the loss of one part of my mother, her memory."

And now, like good books of its kind always do, it is playing yet another variation on this theme of remembrance, making readers like me think of their own mothers, living or gone, in fresh ways and with freshly awakened memories.

Barron is a  photographer by trade, but she knows when to speak and when to shut up, a balance that can be tricky for even the most practiced writers to achieve. She's not afraid of keeping her photographs very specific--a single gown, a pair of stockings, a pile of hangers, the size label from a jacket. And the brief texts that accompany each image—never more than a paragraph in length, and often considerably less—pay close attention but never overexplain. You feel the resonance of those empty spaces, and come to know the author and her mother in a way memoirs ten times this book's length don't always achieve.

The phrase "a gem of a book" sounds hyperbolic...but this genuinely is.