“Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead: A Memoir” by Angela Nissel, c.2026, Amistad, $21.99, 224 pages
For weeks, you’ve been picking at a scar.
Your brain says to stop, but your heart likes the sweet pain you get when you pick, pick, pick. It’s a scar from loss, a scar of trauma – yours, and your parents’ – a scar that might heal in time, or maybe not. You’ve been around a while and you’ve had bruises, but this one, as in the new memoir, “Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead” by Angela Nissel, hurts the most.
Gwendolyn Nissel had experience a lot of triumphs.
She had fought her way to an Ivy League education, marched for civil rights, and worked with the Black Panthers. She raised two kids on her own, and held decent jobs to keep food on the table. She could do anything.
Except beat cancer.
Her daughter, Angela Nissel, 35, was living in California and looking for a job to match the TV writer and producer roles she had held when Gwendolyn was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Nissel’s marriage had crumbled. She was flat broke but she knew where she belonged – back in Philly with her newly married mom, who said she was “fine.” She wasn’t.
Gwendolyn was sick, and Nissel soon became her caretaker. Getting Gwendolyn away from the new husband, who was in the process of taking all her money, was Nissel’s first order of business. Taking her to Los Angeles was the next step, and getting an opinion from a highly regarded doctor, but the cancer had metastasized.
Grief is different for everyone. Nissel was surprised to realize that she hated anybody who still had a mother. She had prayed that God might spare her mom. She tried to love the cancer away. She fought with the brother she adored, until they argued and he cut ties with her.
How is it possible to survive without a mother? How do you stop fighting a fierce enemy like cancer, and start saying goodbye?
First thing: You bring tissues when you read “Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead.” You will need them throughout many parts of the book. Author Angela Nissel tells a story of loss and grief that’s raw and honest. And funny.
The humor is far from disrespectful, though. Nissel has a keen ability to highlight the bitter pill of caring for a beloved sick parent, the horror of breast cancer for Black American women, and the expectations demanded by our culture in the grieving process. She shows readers the personal absurdity of these things. She lets us in on her family’s complicated dynamics, and subtly explains how she stood in her own way sometimes.
Then she’s devastatingly funny, which could be beneficial to someone who is grieving or may soon face sorrow. For some readers, this mix of candor and humor may hit wrong, depending on where you are in the process, so be mindful. And beware of the profanity sprinkled quite liberally throughout this memoir, though it fits the story’s tone and tenor.
Laugh and cry. “Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead” is the right book for both expressions of emotion.
