When it wasn't a hard day, Helen would sit at her mother's knee with Clair's old fashion portfolio, begging for stories about her glamorous past; she improved on her mother's vanity by becoming a life model for the art department at a local college. Helen married an artist who fell in love with her form; they had two daughters of their own before splitting up years ago. Now Jake is the one Helen calls for help. He's always been a cheerful, easygoing fellow; now he shows up at the crime scene wearing a T-shirt that reads, "Life is good." "If there was a reason for our divorce," Helen reflects, "it was this in a nutshell. On this point, we had always disagreed."
Which should suggest that, along with its terrifying truths and vortex of ambivalence, The Almost Moon can be mordantly funny. A symmetry of madness and coping has defined Helen's life: She grew up in a pretend world with a mother who put empty, prettily wrapped gift boxes under the Christmas tree; until the end, though, she has buffed her mother's calluses and painted her toenails the coral color she likes. But if Helen has finally triumphed over her mother's tyranny, she suffers no illusion that this is the end of the story. The daughter has gone from prisoner to executioner.
The title of The Almost Moon comes from an exchange Helen had with her father when she was just old enough to glimpse her mother's madness. "Mom's different, right?" she asks, with the heartbreaking understatement of a child. His answer is both fitting and kind. "I like to think that your mother is almost whole," he tells her. "So much in life is about almosts, not quites." "Like the moon," she answers, simply and fearlessly, because, madness or no, she knows that a mother has an unassailable position in the sky. The riveting question throughout The Almost Moon is what Helen, having systematically smothered her mother, will do now. But the real dramatic tension of this haunting, searing novel belongs to the past: By the time Helen picks up that pillow for her felonious liberation, most of the crimes have long since been committed.
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