My review is copied from my blog. The link is included below.

Review - This is My Office and Notes on My Mother's Decline by Andy Bragen
Title: This is My Office and Notes on My Mother’s Decline: Two Plays*


Author: Andy Bragen


Rating: 4 stars / 5 stars


*This post contains affiliate links. If you make purchases after using these links, I will earn a percentage of your purchase without any further cost to you.


Favorite Quote: “Sometimes I like to think with my head down on the desk and as often as not my thinking turns to daydreaming turns into a full-fledged doze.” Bragen, Andy. This is My Office and Notes on My Mother’s Decline. E-book ed., Northwestern University Press, 2022.


Review: Thank you to the publisher, Northwestern University Press, and the NetGalley platform, that provided me with a free e-ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.


I’ll be totally upfront here and note that I am not an expert in performance art. Nor does my background in English and creative writing provide much of a foundation for the literary art of drama pieces. So this review, perhaps more than most that I write, comes from the perspective of an uninformed and uneducated observer, and therefore can’t, and won’t, focus on structure or adherence to the art form. Really, this review is just about whether I liked it or not. And, spoiler alert, I did.


These two plays follow the arc of the main character, who appears to be the same person throughout both, as, in the first, he reflects on the life and death of his father, and, in the second, he follows the arc of his mother’s decline to her eventual death.


With regard to This is My Office, the narrator does an absolutely spectacular job of weaving in the more banal details of his office with the increasingly depressing memories he has of his father’s life as his father neared his death. In doing so, the narrator balances humor with grief, and with a level of storytelling the weaves the past with the present.


In the second play, there are two perspectives, marked for readers by plain text for the son and bolded text for the declining mother. The interplay between past and present is more subtle in this play, than in the first, but still the history between the two characters is critical for the present moment they find themselves in.


I’m interested in, and a bit confused by, why in the text, anytime the mother says a word that has a double “t,” for example, her nurse is named Loretta, both t’s are removed (ex. Loretta becomes “Lore a”). I’m curious what the purpose of that was, and how that might be accomplished on the stage.


About that Quote: I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about this other than this quote was incredibly relatable. I too am known to “just close my eyes for a moment” only to wake up three hours later, completely confused about my surroundings.


TW for this book: parent loss, descriptions of bodily functions/illness


Have you read This is My Office and Notes on My Mother’s Decline? Share your thoughts below!

I love both of these plays about the human spirit. Evocative, smart, and transcendent. I highly recommend .

Andy Bragen’s book contains two short, autobiographical and quietly powerful plays entitled “This Is My Office” and “Notes On My Mother’s Decline”.
“This Is My Office” is an unconventional, metafictional work where the fact that the play features an actor playing a character in a play is freely acknowledged. We follow Andy Bragen himself who delivers a monologue while taking the “audience” on a tour of his office space, and ultimately of his life. He often breaks the fourth-wall (or whatever it’s called in a stage-play) to address the audience, regretting his failure to get to the point of the play. Andy talks about unfinished screenplays, his childhood, his parents; sleeping in his office and binging on doughnuts. Along the way there is a funny reference to the film “Naked Gun”, personal confessions and a final reconciliation with his father which culminates in a very moving ending.
“Notes on My Mother’s Decline” is a two-handler, equally unconventional in written form in that the text isn’t structured like a play. There is only one stage direction - “Mother” speaks the lines in bold and “Son” speaks the lines that aren’t. The son speaks short sentences about what his mother is doing in her apartment - smoking, sleeping, drinking coffee - while the mother’s lines narrate her steady decline in health in the form of one-sided conversations, both on the phone and in person. This is only changed at the end of the play, when the mother and son are finally “together”. Like its predecessor, this play is incredibly personal, often embarrassingly so, with a shocking twist towards the end. The end itself is, once again, intensely moving.
I found reading both plays an incredibly moving experience. They must be very powerful when performed. I haven’t encountered Andy Bragen’s work before but I am immensely glad that I took a chance on this wonderful book.