"All Gone," a Memoir by Alex Witchel In this haunting, unflinching and at times unexpectedly hilarious memoir, Alex Witchel offers up a fiercely honest account of how her adored mother slowly began "disappearing in plain sight." "All Gone" is a potluck dish containing a variety of ingredients: childhood stories, complete with a cast of vibrantly portrayed relatives; practical knowledge gleaned from Witchel's desperate battle against the relentless advance of her parent's small-stroke-induced dementia; and, yes, real recipes passed down by her mother and grandmother. (I've tried a few, and they're very good. I particularly recommend the chicken with prunes.) Witchel, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and for several years the author of a column in The Times's Dining section called Feed Me, turns to cooking as her preferred form of therapy after a prescription for Effexor doesn't help and some Xanax has been stored away unused. It's her best means of coping with the isolation and despair that assail her as her "magical" mother's mental capacities continue their inexorable downhill slide. In the kitchen, Witchel still feels grounded in her mother's rules, connected to their shared past. "Is there any contract," she asks, "tighter than a family recipe?" Witchel's mother, born Barbara Goldfein, was clearly a dynamo. A working mother was certainly an anomaly in the Passaic, N.J., neighborhood where Witchel spent her early years. At first, Barbara Witchel taught elementary school; but at the same time, she began work on a doctorate. After achieving her Ed.D. from Rutgers, she taught psychology at Newark State College until a family move to Scarsdale necessitated a job change. She then joined the faculty of Iona College, where she taught for the next 35 years. She loved her job. In time, Alex Witchel, the oldest daughter, became her busy mother's willing helper, assisting in the tedium of scoring multiple-choice tests and also in the care of her two younger siblings. Her sister, Phoebe, who appears in Witchel's delightful earlier memoir, "Girls Only," is a full decade her junior. As Witchel saw it, there was no such thing as downtime in her immensely active, independent mother's life. Barbara Witchel shopped and cooked and studied and taught and kept up with all the latest findings in the psychology journals. She also read books to the blind and took political petitions door to door. A devoted gardener, she created a lush flower garden that occupied the entire length of the backyard. Three years after earning her doctorate, she ran for president of the Passaic Board of Education - and won. She also took sculpture classes. Nevertheless, as the oldest and only daughter of a coldly disapproving mother, Barbara Witchel rarely felt truly deserving of praise and was surprised when she received it. Despite the whirlwind pace of her life, Witchel's mother kept herself and her children impeccably well groomed. She was also a gifted listener who would quiz her daughter about her day at school - not the simple overview, but every single thing that had happened. Witchel's father was the exact opposite. He tended to isolate himself from the family, retreating immediately after dinner to the bedroom, where he spent the evening alone. When directly addressed by another member of the family, he would listen without looking up. His replies were often curt and abrupt. The Witchel parents appeared to be living parallel lives, and the household experienced long spells of marital tension. When her father shouted at her mother, Witchel recalls, "I leapt to her defense. She let me. I had gone from being helper to lawyer, bodyguard and godfather. As she grew into young adulthood, Witchel's friendship with her mother deepened: "We'd watch TV together every night in the den while Dad stayed upstairs as usual with a book, the radio and his own TV." Even after leaving home, creating her own successful career as a journalist and marrying the columnist and critic Frank Rich, this dedicated daughter believed her strong mother would be "on the other end of the phone for all eternity." Maggie Scarf is the author of "Intimate Worlds: How Families Thrive and Why They Fail." Her new book, "The Marriage Blueprint," will be published next year.