The Life and Death of My Mother by Allen Wheelis New York:  W. W. Norton, 1992,  128 pp., $17.95 A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux New York:  Ballantine Books, 1992,  90 pp., $8.00 paper Loss of the Ground-Note: Women Writing About the Loss of Their Mothers edited by Helen Vozenilek Los Angeles, CA:  Clothespin Fever Press, 1992,  210 pp., $12.95

In an era when newer hypotheses about etiology, pathogenesis, and therapy increase among followers of specific theories, we find a parallel interest in biography, autobiography, and case histories presented as narrative. Now the current seems to be shifting to what might be called the segmented traumatic event or the relationship loss experience. Allen Wheelis's long essay on The Life and Death of My Mother fits in with literary flow.

Allen Wheelis, 73 when he wrote this sensitive account of the last days of his 100-year-old mother, is well known to us. He was born in Louisiana, grew up in Texas, moved about when his physician father developed tuberculosis, and finally became a physician himself. He received his medical education at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons; spent three years in the Navy during World War II; then received his psychiatric training at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, and his psychoanalytic education at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. At present he practices psychiatry and psychoanalysis in San Francisco.

My first contact with his work was through the study of his book The Quest for Identity (1958). He has also written How People Change (1975), On Not Knowing How to Live, (1976), and The Doctor of Desire (1988). He is an excellent writer, and the contents