She was much more, of course, than the weakly wasting she-gnome in a nursing home bed, her hair gone white, her back stooped, her wrists like twigs and her nostrils flaring oxygen tubing. The woman in that bed herself offered a few clues, stirring from sleep with a radiant smile, wanting CNN on the TV, making endearing and funny chat with the young male aide bringing her meals, the nurse bending to check her bedsore, the daughter who arrives with sweaters and a fake peony from Target.

A bony slip of a thing with her lungs failing and her mind going fickle, yet still the smart and funny remarks, the unerring sense of comic timing, the wanting to know about the daughter’s life (and reasking the questions, when the answers quickly vanish in her head, with the same generous attentiveness), and the spirited, if much-repeated, anecdotes, disproportionately drawn from the earliest, happiest decades of her life—the charmed childhood years in a lake-dotted city neighborhood with her musician parents and her swell big brother, the adventurous young adult years of a business career she relished and—in marriage to a deceitful and selfish man—lost.