Sometimes, we get a second chance to right a wrong. In Ruth Reichl's case, she required four.

Finally, though, the former New York Times food critic turned memoirist paid up on the debt to her mother that had been accumulating since her first memoir, "Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table," in 1998. Two other memoirs followed, "Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table" in 2001, and "Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise" in 2005. Each was her story, but inevitably her mother Miriam was her punch line, scapegoat, shame and quandary.

Now, in her latest memoir, "Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way" (Penguin, 128 pages, $19.95), Reichl owns up to ill-using her mother. Sort of. Of her initial memoir, she writes that "the first time I held the printed book in my hand I winced. I could not keep from thinking that I had betrayed my mother. It was not a good feeling and I wanted to make it up to her."

But then the second memoir came out, with more tales of the eccentric mother who cooked experimentally, apparently with a guardian angel of food poisoning on her shoulder, and who took a buffet of medications for what eventually was diagnosed as manic depression. Tellingly, Reichl writes that she never would have shared these stories while her mother was alive. Yet came the third memoir, "each time getting deeper into my mother's debt.

Someday, I kept saying, I'll write Mom's book."

Here it is, then, and it provides a fuller picture of the woman whom Reichl's readers have gaped at as a sort of absurdist homemaker and parent to the always searching, always passionate, always too-cool-for-school daughter. The book turns on Reichl finding a box of her mother's letters, notes and clippings. As she read them, she found a woman who had little in common with the comi-tragic foil of the earlier memoirs.

Instead, she found a woman whose marriage was not always happy, who wondered what she could expect from life, who hoped her daughter could support herself.

"She was more thoughtful, more self-aware and much more generous than I had ever appreciated," Reichl wrote. It turns out that Miriam herself had a mother whom she could never please. She was all too aware that a life on pills was no life at all, yet also "came back to life" as she turned 80.

As Reichl writes: "When she found that (my brother) and I could not keep from treating her like the sad old Mom she used to be, she simply cut us loose. She did not need that. For the happiest years of her life, Mom relied almost entirely on herself."

The book goes on like that for most of its 110 pages, which proves a welcome brevity. Perhaps Reichl, 61, could not have written this book any earlier in her life, discovered letters or not. That's why they call it maturing.

Still, for those who read her earlier memoirs with a discomfiting sense that she was using her mother's foibles as a sort of literary prop, it's grim comfort to read that she suspected the same of herself. Unfortunately, the result is a book through which a vein of guilt runs crookedly, like mold through Roquefort. Read the book, but not for Reichl's sake. Read it for her mother.