"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away ..." So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed by the miseries of her place and time.