THE MOMMA PUZZLE

In this memoir, Plattner investigates her mother’s 1968 suicide through letters, photographs, and family documents, seeking understanding after decades of silence.

In 1968, when the author was 6, her mother took her own life in their home in Amherst, Massachusetts. The youngster was later told not to speak of it; she froze when a caller asked for her mom, and her father snatched the phone away and snapped into the receiver, “There is no Mrs. Plattner.” At the age of 60 and living in Brooklyn, New York, Plattner—who founded and directed Brooklyn Writers, a community-based writing program—spread her mother’s papers across her desk, including the contents of a folder marked “Personal.” She wanted to reconstruct an image of the woman who had read to her from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) before vanishing into the upstairs eaves, where she died. Plattner’s narrative moves between early-2020s Brooklyn and archival materials spanning from 1933 to 1968, and it notes that her maternal grandfather also died by suicide in 1943. Letters reveal a lively young woman, as when she took a trip aboard the S.S. President Wilson in 1956. Family members, however, offer little clarity; an uncle recalls her mother as “always very quiet” and notes that he “never talked with her” about their father’s death. The book’s archival method—reproducing letters, Christmas cards, newspaper clippings—creates a feeling of intimacy while foregrounding what cannot be known. A painter’s business card, dress designs clipped from magazines, and a typed greeting from “Your supply-man: NGUYEN” accumulate texture, but the most powerful passages acknowledge the limits of documentation. Suicide, the author writes, makes people “disappear. Even more than ordinary death”; her mother left no note, no explanation. Plattner’s prose moves between clinical observation and raw grief. She catalogs facts—Momma, she writes, was “a terrible speller,” majored in French, and studied in Paris—but struggled with interpretation, and for the reader, the accumulation can feel excessive. But such profusion may be the result of Plattner effectively reproducing the experience of mourning itself, which makes one reluctant to discard any fragment that might still carry meaning.

An intimate, if diffuse, account of parental loss.