trauma of early parental loss reasserts itself in different forms throughout a lifetime.” And, “There must be something wrong with me, I concluded, or my family wouldn’t have given me away. In a sense, it was better if it was my fault, since I firmly believed that what I had caused I could surely correct.” And, “Orphan adolescents have a terrible dilemma: they have a developmental need to break away, but their parents have beaten them to the punch.” Of the many struggles Cournos describes, two themes carried throughout the book are particularly poignant. The first is loyalty. For the author this loyalty is to her mother. Hence Cournos’ quest involves reaching some stage in life that would allow her to turn her attention away from her mother to those in her present. Cournos writes, “Once in a while, I was invited to a gathering of my entire family, where I went through the motions, polite and utterly detached. What felt most real was my sense that I carried Mom (and sometimes my Dad, too) with me everywhere I went, a little homunculus inside my brain. Mom participated in all my activities, living on through me.” The second particularly moving theme is the overwhelming tension between independence and dependence. Cournos writes about herself, “One side insisted on managing without being close to anyone, said it’s just not worth it, people are too unreliable, only a fool would persist in the face of all the evidence that it never works out and never will. But the other part of me was desperate, needy, driven by desire, afraid to be alone. I hated my contradictory feelings and wished I could banish them, but there was no escape.” Through much of her life Cournos managed to survive, as she describes, by “saying nothing about something— my mother and I had perfected this technique. Saying something might just make it worse.” Fortunately for us, Cournos has decided to speak, and to do so meaningfully. If anything, she sells Hers is a one-person story of a theme offered in an earlier book by Harris (1), The Loss That Is Forever. However, one can “lose” a parent in other ways besides death, such as through serious mental illness, as described by Lyden (2), and through alcoholism, as reported by Agnew and Robideaux (3). City of One can be read as applicable to the loss of a parent or parents even through their abject neglect. Much of what Cournos describes has a universality far beyond her own circumstances.
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Sep 1, 1999
Jeffrey L Geller 
Open Access