Epic and fleeting, tender and excruciating, this is a beautifully strange account of the death of Cixous's centenarian mother. Everywhere in these pages we feel the urgency of writing and of life. In Peggy Kamuf's limpid and remarkable translation, this book constitutes an indispensable addition to Cixous's oeuvre on writing, love and the maternal unconscious.'
Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex

Mother Homer is Dead ... was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of the writer's mother in the 103rd year of her life. Ève Cixous, née Klein, had figured centrally in her daughter's writing since the publication of Osnabrück (1999). Since then, Cixous's work has turned in ever-tighter orbits around the relation to her mother's life as it tapers down toward death.

Perhaps never has the agony of letting go of the dying one been so unflinchingly rendered. Cixous's exquisitely poetic prose has also never been put to a more harrowing test of its inventive capacities.


Hélène Cixous is Emeritus Professor at the Centre d'Etudes Féminine at Université Paris VIII and A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
Peggy Kamuf is Professor Emerita of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

[Note change to credit line since original brief]
Cover image: Statuette of a Mother with Child, 6th-5th century BC, Terracotta. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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ISBN 978-1-4744-2511-7
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