Word: mumness
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...school, living what seemed an airless life with her cat, Pebbles. When she auditioned for a TV talent show in 1995--in the age of arrogance and affluence--she was scorned. So she sang karaoke at the pub and cared for her ailing mother until the day she died. "Mum was my life," Boyle said. "She was the one who said I should enter Britain's Got Talent. We used to watch it together. She thought I would win." Boyle arrived center stage, with her awkward dignity and eyebrows like live mice, and even then fame mocked her with...
Buckley died just 10 months after his wife Patricia, who was 80. Their son Christopher has written a memoir of that difficult year titled Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve; 251 pages). Christopher--as we will call him to avoid muddling our Buckleys--is best known as a comic novelist (Thank You for Smoking, Supreme Courtship), and in taking on such a tragic, personal subject, he's punching well above his weight class. But his sense of the absurd turns out to be oddly well suited to observing the numerous medical and existential indignities associated with dying, as well...
...never quite did. This forced his son to grow up all the faster, to the point where he could actually forgive his father's failings or at least laugh about them (though there is an element of Oedipal assassination in this lovingly unflattering portrait). The poetry of Losing Mum and Pup--and it has some--arises from the fact that even extraordinary people are not exempt from the pedestrian, democratic reality of death. When Christopher complains about his father's driving, his aunt says wryly, "Don't you understand? The rules don't apply...
...What do your friends, family and colleagues make of the move? Mum and dad are over the moon. They'll be coming out here on holiday. I spoke to a good friend today who advised me to enjoy the next couple of days in Australia because the news is absolutely everywhere in the U.K. It will be overwhelming to walk into work next week and tell the boss that unfortunately I won't be coming back...
...Lario, 52, a former B-movie actress, is usually invisible on the public stage, rarely seen by her husband's side and keeping mum on the political issues of the day. But when she does speak up, Lario exercises her First Lady powers in another way: rather than try to bump up her husband's poll numbers with public charm or policy advice, she cuts him down with character attacks that stick in a way Berlusconi's many public critics wish they could match...