Wah!
Things I Never Told My Mother
Sandstone Press 2022
Shortlisted for Highland Book Prize
Audio book, ebook and paperback
Cynthia’s mother is dying. Often.
Travelling between her home in Scotland and California, as she spends time at her mother’s bedside Cynthia recalls her youthful adventures: living in a squat, train-hopping, hitchhiking and all the other things she never told her mother.
‘A selfie of a tearaway with a real writer in control of the chaos. A wonderful and courageous book.’
– Bernard MacLaverty
‘I devoured this delicious memoir.’
– Patrick Gale
‘Cynthia Rogerson doesn’t spare the horses of intimacy; she tells it like it is and she tells it all. ‘Wah’ is witty, rich in revelation, and elegantly written. Her style owes something to Richard Brautigan – she’s from California after all – and this only increases my delight in reading it. I’m really enjoying it.’
– Chris Stewart
‘WAH! is as poignant as it is hilarious, and that is saying something. Everyone with a mother should read this book.’
– Louisa Young
‘I really loved the book and wanted to finish it. Very impressive, and a joy to read. I’m going to pass it on to my wife immediately. A memoir about joy in the shadow of grief, WAH! is both moving and funny, with a wonderfully light touch – completely charming.’
– Tim Dowling
‘Wah! seems at first to be a tragicomic account of a dying mother who won’t die. But gradually, with Rogerson’s distinctive fusion of empathetic warmth and unrestrained frankness, it encompasses the entire scope of life from childhood to old age, and all the different kinds of love.’
– Michel Faber
‘Wah! is witty, compassionate, playful, scarily honest and emotionally accurate. It does that rare, liberating thing, being funny about pain – I think of The Roches – without diminishing either the humour or the hurt. It’s a head-on book about drawn-out loss of a parent to old age and dementia. More widely, it is about how we lose our own life as we live it, how we kid and console ourselves. It is a personal memoir with universal resonance, for this is about a pain which will come to us all if we’re lucky. The writing is deceptively casual, fashioned with a great deal of concealed Art and deftness. And it is adventurous in its alternation of personal memoir with short stories written out of that life. It works. For me, Wah! quietly goes deeper than most memoirs, touching us in our own life, and lingers with me long after closing the book.
‘I have much enjoyed all Cynthia Rogerson’s novels since ‘Upstairs in the tent’, but Wah! may be her most lasting achievement.’
– Andrew Greig
‘I’ve read and enjoyed Wah, which cheerfully and intelligently subverts most more conventional memoirs I’ve read. How do you write about your mother’s love without sentimentality or her marriage without simplicity? I don’t know, but novelist Cynthia Rogerson does – along with how to write a memoir as open-hearted and engaging as this.’
– David Robinson (former Scotsman fiction editor)
‘A rich, lyrical text that will show the tears at the heart of things.’
– Richard Holloway
‘I love this story. So fascinating and so much of its time. It made me feel nostalgic for certain music and conversations. And a more free life. That’s not possible now, but it was how you felt then. As if only conversation and music mattered.’
– Isla Dewar
‘Cynthia Rogerson deserves to be far better known than she is for her sharp-witted, warm and perceptive fiction. In this scintillating memoir, covering six decades and moving between California and the Scottish Highlands, she delivers another wonderful book. As her mother, afflicted with dementia, fades slowly from life Cynthia recalls key moments from a conventional childhood, wilder adolescence and breakaway early twenties. These episodes and her older self’s commentary on them are laugh-aloud funny, poignant, rude, wicked, shallow and profound – sometimes all on the same page. WAH! is a textbook lesson in how not to learn the lessons of life, but whoever said that’s what life is for? I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in ages.’
– James Robertson
‘Cynthia Rogerson’s memoir, Wah! is a marvellous read. It’s searingly, almost wincingly, honest yet at the same time teases the reader by embroidering over the line between memoir and fiction. Rogerson is especially good at portraying the tenderness and confusion of pain and loss, the complex tangle of feelings we have for our loved ones, and her wisecracks skewer even the bleakest moments.’
– Lesley Glaister