When Barbara Frum died at age 54 on March 26, 1992, media outlets across Canada noted her passing with an outpouring of grief and praise.

As an interviewer for CBC Radio’s “As It Happens” and subsequently for CBC TV’s “The Journal,” Frum became one of the most influential women in Canada. Part of the power of Frum’s personal mystique was the way her private 18-year battle with leukemia haunted her rise to fame. Linda Frum was 15 in 1978 when she first learned of her mother’s condition. The news came from Barbara Frum herself, who had already been living with the disease for five years.

No doubt Linda Frum needed to write this book as part of the natural process of coming to terms with her mother’s death. However, it is questionable whether a broad audience needs to read it.

Barbara Frum was an exceptional woman and deserves a considerable niche in the annals of Canadian journalism – until now, sadly underpopulated by women. But Linda Frum is hardly the person to assign her mother a place of importance in those annals specifically because, to cite that old professional danger, “she’s too close to her subject.” While Linda may, as the publisher’s blurb promises, show readers “the woman behind the microphone,” it is hardly a disinterested portrait she paints.

And, strangely enough for a memoir such as this, the book is haunted by an absence of forthrightness as Linda Frum tends to skitter nervously past discussing her own personal feelings about growing up with a dynamic, famous mother who “stretched her day with a magician’s ingenuity” but “may not have given as much of her time to my brothers and myself as we might have wished.” A reader senses more conflict here than daughter Frum is comfortable revealing.

Furthermore, media critics and students of journalism won’t learn much about Barbara Frum’s professional life or the inner workings of the CBC from this memoir. The biographical facts are there, of course: Barbara’s early life in Niagara Falls, where her father Harold inherited his father’s department store, Rosberg’s; Barbara’s courtship by the energetic, optimistic Murray Frum, Toronto dentist turned wealthy developer; Barbara’s energy, her working habits, and her obsession with gardening and renovations to the family home…. Linda Frum occasionally indicates she knows her family is a topic of gossip and prurience – as when she reveals that Barbara was not as out of sympathy with her son David’s right-wing views as her fans might have liked.

But what’s missing is just the sort of analysis Canadian journalism most sorely needs: an evaluation of Barbara Frum’s importance as a woman journalist and an assessment of the role her own uneasy relationship with feminism played in the shaping of her career. One hopes that is the sort of work someone other than a beloved daughter will one day provide.