Finding the correct balance between saying too little or saying too much is a delicate juggling act when crafting a memoir, and it is an equilibrium THE MENDED MIRROR by Karen Celeste Hilfman almost, though not quite, achieves. On the one hand, the book delves into many captivating, loving, personal, and sometimes painful recollections of tending a parent with dissociative identity disorder (DID) as they near the end of their life, along with detailing exactly how it felt living with a mother who suffered from this kind of mental anguish while the author and her siblings were growing up. Relating intimate details regarding a DNA test taken in adulthood that reveals several immediate family members were biologically fathered by someone other than the dad who raised them are shared, for instance, to startling effect. Yet, in terms of offering adequate clues about how precisely the mother came to have these distinct personalities ranging from the sad three-year-old who slipped into baby talk wondering why people hurt her to a screamingly angry banshee to the seductress who casts come hither glances while proclaiming how much she loved her daddy, there’s not, in the end, quite enough shared.

Presumably someone had access to private journals or letters once various family members passed on, as well as an ability to dialog with extended family members still alive and this may have been able to shed more light on the root of the problem, but while some kind of mistreatment at the hands of one or more relations is alluded to, in terms of the book overall being well-rounded enough to be helpful to others who might also be dealing with someone suffering from DID, the stories provided fall a bit short. Yet the book itself is quite long. The word ‘brother’ appears unceremoniously 35 times in the 900+ page volume, for example, while the critical term ‘abuse’ appears a mere 4 times. Meanwhile, other portions of the text are repetitive with certain phrases and tales related more than once for no apparent or useful reason. Due to the important nature of the subject, along with the goal of helping educate the world towards heart-centered connection/community, pruning away whatever is unnecessary towards providing a deeper dive into the heart of the matter would be beneficial, as would a hyperlinked Table of Contents for reader-friendly navigation.

Informative and interactive resources are included in Karen Celeste Hilfman’s THE MENDED MIRROR, along with the author’s personal exploration of attempting to make peace with the mysteries inherent in being raised by a mother with multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder in an unconditionally loving, if a bit rambling, memoir.

~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader