In My Mother's Music, acclaimed stylist Paul West has taken on a monumental labor of love in portraying his mother, an English butcher's daughter and concert pianist manque whose magnum opus was her children's lives. Mildred Noden West orchestrated the education of her son and daughter like a grand concerto, shaping, cajoling, haranguing them into capitalizing on their gifts whether they liked it or not.

As West puts it with characteristic bravura and humor, "she vented and honed a fearsome amount of nervous energy otherwise channeled into hurling blue bags of sugar at my father's head (she always missed)." She was never boring.

West's mother occupies center stage in this exultant memoir ("She stayed put while we went away, and that was how she preferred it."), but his inimitable prose practically constitutes a character in itself: headlong, quirky, sometimes drunk on its own rhythms yet never more precise than at those moments when it threatens to sheer off from sense into pure music.

In his matchless rememberings, West recreates the arc of his mother's years, from her youthful aspirations, to her "fierce, harrying love," to her death at the age of ninety. In My Mother's Music he performs the ultimate task of a child - to imagine a parent whole, apart from her effects on him, and in so doing give her a kind of life in death.