For this absorbing portrait of his mother, David Chandler drew on hundreds of letters that she sent and received, on his own warm memories, and the many and copious medical records from her hospitalizations in 1937 and 1963, afflicted with what were then called nervous breakdowns. Gabrielle Chanler, nicknamed Bebo as a small child, was born into the upper reaches of New York society, deftly described in the novels of Edith Wharton, a life-long...