Speechless

Speechless is a touching memoir by Tom Lanoye about his mother's final years. After a stroke, Lanoye's mother, an amateur actress, loses her ability to speak. Slowly but inevitably she deteriorates, less and less able to communicate with her loved ones. In Speechless, Tom Lanoye draws up the balance of his colourful childhood, his struggle with love, his role as an author. He writes of conflict with his beloved diva of a mother and the illness she so bravely fights and in which she irretrievably and speechlessly declines, and of the anger and the pain that causes.