Taking My Mother to the Opera, by Diane Brown (Otago, 2015)

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Neil

Diane Brown is a Dunedin-based poet, novelist, memoirist, and creative writing teacher. Her new book is a personal memoir in verse. It's about her own life, and that of her parents, told through a series of deeply personal vignettes taking in social history of the 1950s and 60s, old age and dementia, marriage and divorce, the delusions of youth. It's searingly honest, very moving and very funny. This would not have been an easy book to write. It's very easy to read, however, but it continues to resonate long after it's finished.