front cover of All the Lost Girls
All the Lost Girls
Confessions of a Southern Daughter
Patricia Foster
University of Alabama Press, 2002
Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award
 
Patricia Foster’s lyrical yet often painful memoir explores the life of a white middle-class girl who grew up in rural south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, a time and place that did not tolerate deviation from traditional gender roles. Her mother raised Foster and her sister as “honorary boys,” girls with the ambition of men but the temperament of women.
 
An unhappy, intelligent woman who kept a heartbreaking secret from everyone close to her, Foster's mother was driven by a repressed rage that fed her obsession for middle-class respectability. By the time Foster reached age fifteen, her efforts to reconcile the contradictory expectations that she be at once ambitious and restrained had left her nervous and needy inside even while she tried to cultivate the appearance of the model student, sister, and daughter. It was only a psychological and physical breakdown that helped her to realize that she couldn't save her driven, complicated mother and must struggle instead for both understanding and autonomy.
 
[more]

front cover of All Will Yet Be Well
All Will Yet Be Well
The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873-1952
Suzanne L. Bunkers
University of Iowa Press, 1993

Sarah Gillespie Huftalen led an unconventional life for a rural midwestern woman of her time. Born in 1865 near Manchester, Iowa, she was a farm girl who became a highly regarded country school and college teacher; she married a man older than either of her parents, received a college degree later in life, and was committed to both family and career. A gifted writer, she crafted essays, teacher-training guides, and poetry while continuing to write lengthy, introspective entries in her diary, which spans the years from 1873 to 1952. In addition, she gathered extensive information about the quietly tragic life of her mother, Emily, and worked to preserve Emily's own detailed diary.

In more than 3,500 pages, Sarah writes about her multiple roles as daughter, sister, wife, teacher, family historian, and public figure. Her diary reflects the process by which she was socialized into these roles and her growing consciousness of the ways in which these roles intersected. Not only does her diary embody the diverse strategies used by one woman to chart her life's course and to preserve her life's story for future generations, it also offers ample evidence of the diary as a primary form of private autobiography for individuals whose lives do not lend themselves to traditional definitions of autobiography.

Taken together, Emily's and Sarah's extraordinary diaries span nearly a century and thus form a unique mother/daughter chronicle of daily work and thoughts, interactions with neighbors and friends and colleagues, and the destructive family dynamics that dominated the Gillespies. Sarah's consciousness of the abusive relationship between her mother and father haunts her diary, and this dramatic relationship is duplicated in Sarah's relationship with her brother, Henry, Suzanne Bunkers' skillful editing and analysis of Sarah's diary reveal the legacy of a caring, loving mother reflected in her daughter's work as family member, teacher, and citizen.

The rich entries in Sarah Gillespie Huftalen's diary offer us brilliant insights into the importance of female kinship networks in American life, the valued status of many women as family chroniclers, and the fine art of selecting, piecing, stitching, and quilting that characterizes the many shapes of women's autobiographies. Read Sarah's dairy to discover why "all will yet be well."

[more]

front cover of Amá, Your Story Is Mine
Amá, Your Story Is Mine
Walking Out of the Shadows of Abuse
By Ercenia "Alice" Cedeño
University of Texas Press, 2007

In the preface to her memoir, Ercenia "Alice" Cedeño recalls the secrecy and turmoil that marked her youth: "I spent most of my growing years mad at my mother and wanting her to change to fit in with the rest of the world," she writes. "When my sisters and I wanted her to visit our friends' mothers, she would say, 'Why do people need to know other peoples' lives?' Looking back, I wonder if she was really saying, 'I don't want them to know our business.' There was so much to hide."

Now bringing those hidden memories to light, Amá, Your Story Is Mine traces the hardship, violence, deceit, and defiance that shaped the identity of two generations of women in Alice's family. Born in the mountains of northern Mexico, Alice's mother married at age 14 into a family rife with passion that often turned to anger. After losing several infant children to disease, the young couple crossed into the United States seeking a better life.

Unfolding in a series of powerful vignettes, Amá, Your Story Is Mine describes in captivating detail a daring matriarch who found herself having to protect her children from their own father while facing the challenges of cultural discrimination. By turns wry and tender, Alice's recollections offer a rare memoir that fully encompasses the Latina experience in the United States.

[more]

front cover of ANATOMY ERRATA
ANATOMY ERRATA
JUDITH HALL
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

front cover of Appropriately Subversive
Appropriately Subversive
Modern Mothers in Traditional Religions
Tova Hartman Halbertal
Harvard University Press, 2003

How do mothers reconcile conflicting loyalties--to their religious traditions, and to the daughters whose freedoms are also constrained by those traditions? Searching for answers, Tova Hartman Halbertal interviewed mothers of teenage daughters in religious communities: Catholics in the United States, Orthodox Jews in Israel.

Sounding surprisingly alike, both groups described conscious struggles between their loyalties and talked about their attempts to make sense of and pass on their multiple commitments. They described accommodations and rationalizations and efforts to make small changes where they felt that their faith unjustly subordinated women. But often they did not feel they could tell their daughters how troubled they were. To keep their daughters safe within the protective culture of their ancestors, the mothers had to hide much of themselves in the hope that their daughters would know them more completely in the future.

Moving and unique, this book illuminates one of the moral questions of our time--how best to protect children and preserve community, without being imprisoned by tradition.

[more]

front cover of Broken Butterfly
Broken Butterfly
My Daughter's Struggle with Brain Injury
Karin Finell
University of Missouri Press, 2012

“It all began with the bite of a mosquito. Yes, with a bite of this pesky, but seemingly so innocuous little insect that had been sucking her blood. Not just one, but hundreds had punctured her arms and legs with red marks which later swelled to small welts. Who would ever have thought that our family's life would become derailed, that its tightly woven fabric would eventually fray and break—all from the bite of a mosquito?”

In November of 1970, the Finell family’s lives were changed forever by a family vacation to Acapulco. Seven-year-old Stephanie fell ill soon after their return to the United States, but her mother, Karin, thinking it was an intestinal disorder, kept her home from school for a few days. She was completely unprepared when Stephanie went into violent convulsions on a Friday morning. Following a series of tests at the hospital, doctors concluded she had contracted viral equine encephalitis while in Mexico.
After a string of massive seizures—one leading to cardiac arrest—Stephanie fell into a six-week coma. When she awoke, her world had changed from predictable and comforting to one where the ground was shaking. Due to the swelling of her brain from encephalitis, she suffered serious brain damage. Doctors saw little hope of recovery for Stephanie and encouraged her parents to place her in an institution, but they refused.
In Broken Butterfly, Karin Finell recounts the struggles faced by both her and her daughter, as well as the small victories won over the ensuing years. Little was known about brain injuries during that time, and Karin was forced to improvise, relying on her instincts, to treat Stephanie. Despite the toll on the family—alcoholism, divorce, and estrangement—Karin never gave up hope for Stephanie’s recovery. By chance, Karin heard of the Marianne Frostig Center of Educational Therapy, where Dr. Frostig herself took over the “reprogramming” of Stephanie’s brain. This, in time, led her to regain her speech and some motor skills.
Unfortunately, Stephanie’s intermittent seizures hung like the proverbial “Sword of Damocles” over their lives. And while Stephanie grew into a lovely young woman, her lack of judgment resulting from her injury led her into situations of great danger that required Karin to rescue her.
Karin’s love for her daughter guided her to allow Stephanie to fill her life with as many positive experiences as possible. Stephanie learned and matured through travel and exposure to music and plays,acquiring a knowledge she could not learn from books.
Stephanie wished above all to teach other brain injured individuals to never look down on themselves but to live their lives to the fullest. Through Stephanie’s story, her mother has found a way to share that optimism and her lessons with the world.
[more]

front cover of Cauterized
Cauterized
Laura Apol
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Cauterize: to burn or freeze the flesh around a wound to stop heavy bleeding. In her sixth full-length collection, award-winning poet Laura Apol returns to themes of loss that are, at least partly, cauterized: her struggles with a conservative religious upbringing, her mother’s illness and death, children growing up and leaving home, losing her adult daughter to suicide, a worldwide pandemic, the casualties of age. With startling honesty, empathy, and lyrical precision, Apol offers insight into the ways some wounds need cautery to begin to heal. This is a book that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with the complexities of grief, forgiveness, resilience, and healing across time.
[more]

front cover of Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge
Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge
A Journey to My Daughter's Birthplace in China
Nancy McCabe
University of Missouri Press, 2011
 
Even before Nancy McCabe and her daughter, Sophie, left for China, it was clear that, as the mother of an adopted child from China, McCabe would be seeing the country as a tourist while her daughter, who was seeing the place for the first time in her memory, was “going home.” Part travelogue, part memoir, Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge immerses readers in an absorbing and intimate exploration of place and its influence on the meaning of family.
A sequel to Meeting Sophie, which tells McCabe’s story of adopting Sophie as a single woman, Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge picks up a decade later with a much different Sophie—a ten-year-old with braces who wears black nail polish, sneaks eyeliner, wears clothing decorated with skulls, and has mixed feelings about being one of the few non-white children in the little Pennsylvania town where they live. Since she was young, Sophie had felt a closeness to the country of her birth and held it in an idealized light. At ten, she began referring to herself as Asian instead of Asian-American. It was McCabe’s hope that visiting China would “help her become comfortable with both sides of the hyphen, figure out how to be both Chinese and American, together.”
As an adoptive parent of a foreign-born child, McCabe knows that homeland visits are an important rite of passage to help children make sense of the multiple strands of their heritage, create their own hybrid traditions, and find their particular place in the world. Yet McCabe, still reeling from her mother’s recent death, wonders how she can give any part of Sophie back to her homeland. She hopes that Sophie will find affirmation and connection in China, even as she sees firsthand some of the realities of China—overpopulation, pollution, and an oppressive government—but also worries about what that will mean for their relationship.
Throughout their journey on a tour for adopted children, mother and daughter experience China very differently. New tensions and challenges emerge, illuminating how closely intertwined place is with sense of self. As the pair learn to understand each other, they lay the groundwork for visiting Sophie’s orphanage and birth village, life-changing experiences for them both.
[more]

front cover of Crossing the Ladder of the Sun
Crossing the Ladder of the Sun
Laura Apol
Michigan State University Press, 2004

In her new collection of poetry, Crossing the Ladder of Sun, Laura Apol explores the ordinary moments of life—watching her daughter, picking blueberries, sharing confidences with friends, arriving and leaving, and driving, always driving—and transforms them into the extraordinary. This book is rich with the lyrical found in what is considered the mundane as it portrays the multiple roles of a woman’s life—mother, daughter, lover, ex-wife, friend. Apol’s highly personal poems reflect a caring and compassion that transcends loneliness and heartache.

[more]

front cover of Doña Barbara
Doña Barbara
A Novel
Rómulo Gallegos
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Rómulo Gallegos is best known for being Venezuela’s first democratically elected president. But in his native land he is equally famous as a writer responsible for one of Venezuela’s literary treasures, the novel Doña Barbara. Published in 1929 and all but forgotten by Anglophone readers, Doña Barbara is one of the first examples of magical realism, laying the groundwork for later authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Following the epic struggle between two cousins for an estate in Venezuela, Doña Barbara is an examination of the conflict between town and country, violence and intellect, male and female. Doña Barbara is a beautiful and mysterious woman—rumored to be a witch—with a ferocious power over men. When her cousin Santos Luzardo returns to the plains in order to reclaim his land and cattle, he reluctantly faces off against Doña Barbara, and their battle becomes simultaneously one of violence and seduction. All of the action is set against the stunning backdrop of the Venezuelan prairie, described in loving detail. Gallegos’s plains are filled with dangerous ranchers, intrepid cowboys, and damsels in distress, all broadly and vividly drawn. A masterful novel with an important role in the inception of magical realism, Doña Barbara is a suspenseful tale that blends fantasy, adventure, and romance.

Hailed as “the Bovary of the llano” by Larry McMurtry in his new foreword to this book, Doña Barbarais a magnetic and memorable heroine, who has inspired numerous adaptations on the big and small screens, including a recent television show that aired on Telemundo.

[more]

front cover of The Fairest of Them All
The Fairest of Them All
Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters
Maria Tatar
Harvard University Press, 2020

“With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.”
—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked


The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in unforgettable variations across countries and cultures.

“Fascinating…A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.”
Wall Street Journal

“Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all?…Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale…a feast of rich thoughts…An exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.”
—Marina Warner

“The inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’”
—Honor Moore

“Shocking yet familiar, these stories…retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book.”
Literary Review

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Fanny Herself
Edna Ferber
University of Illinois Press, 1917
Heralded by one reviewer as "the most serious, extended and dignified of [Edna] Ferber's books," Fanny Herself is the intensely personal chronicle of a young girl growing up Jewish in a small midwestern town. Packed with the warmth and the wry, sidelong wit that made Ferber one of the best-loved writers of her time, the novel charts Fanny's emotional growth through her relationship with her mother, the shrewd, sympathetic Molly Brandeis.
 
"You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being aware of Mrs. Brandeis," Ferber begins, and likewise the story of Fanny Brandeis is inextricable from that of her vigorous, enterprising mother. Molly Brandeis is the owner and operator of Brandeis' Bazaar, a modest general store left to her by her idealistic, commercially inept late husband. As Fanny strives to carve out her own sense of herself, Molly becomes the standard by which she measures her intellectual and spiritual progress.
 
Fanny's ambivalent feelings about being Jewish, her self-deprecating attitude toward her gift for sketching and drawing, and her inspired success as a businesswoman all contribute to the flesh-and-blood complexity of Ferber's youthful, eminently believable protagonist. She is accompanied on her journey by impeccably drawn characters such as Father Fitzpatrick, the Catholic priest in Winnebago; Ella Monahan, buyer for the glove department of the Haynes-Cooper mail order house; Fanny's brother, Theodore, a gifted violinist for whose musical education Molly sacrifices Fanny's future; and Clarence Heyl, the scrappy columnist who never forgot how Fanny rescued him from the school bullies.
 
Ferber's only work of fiction with a strong autobiographical element, Fanny Herself showcases the author's enduring interest in the capacity of strong women to transcend the limitations of their environment and control their own circumstances. Through Fanny's honest struggle with conflicting values–financial security and corporate success versus altruism and artistic integrity–Ferber grapples with some of the most deeply embedded contradictions of the American spirit.
 
 
 
 
[more]

front cover of Fever Dogs
Fever Dogs
Stories
Kim O'Neil
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Finalist, 2017 Balcones Fiction prize

Kim O’Neil’s debut collection, Fever Dogs, is a fictional biography of three generations of women. It begins at the turn of the twenty-first century with Jean, a young woman at an impasse. Romantically adrift, in a dying profession, she decides that to make herself a future, she must first make herself a past. 

To deal with a violent history, Jean’s mother has violently erased it. Starting from a bare outline that includes an unspoken death, a predatory father, and a homeless stint, Jean reconstructs the life her mother, Jane, might have lived. But origin stories can never completely cover their tracks: like Jean’s story, Jane’s cannot be told apart from that of her own mother. 

What follows is a set of stories spanning nearly a century in response to questions the narrator wishes she had asked her mother and to which she has disjointed answers at best. In the absence of answers, the narrator, in various points of view, invents them. As the stories progress backward in time, the footholds in fact grow fewer and the shift to fabulism greater. But in her attempt to unravel her mother's origin and her own, Jean finds that the stories she invents—like the dogs who run through them as witnesses, allies, and objects of desire—serve as well as any other in the makeshift task of authoring a life.
[more]

front cover of Full Fathom Five
Full Fathom Five
A Daughter's Search
Mary Lee Coe Fowler
University of Alabama Press, 2008
One woman’s quest for knowledge of her father lost at sea

Mary Lee Coe Fowler was a posthumous child, born after her father, a submarine skipper in the Pacific, was lost at sea in 1943. Her mother quickly remarried into a difficult and troubled relationship, and Mary Lee’s biological father was never mentioned. It was not until her mother died and Mary Lee was a middle-aged adult that she set out to learn not only who her father was, but what happened to him and his crew, and why—and also to confront why she had shied away from asking these questions until it was nearly too late.
 
Fowler searched through old ships’ logs, letters, and naval communiqués; visited submarine museums, the Naval Academy, and other pertinent sites; interviewed old friends and crew members who knew her dad and mom or served concurrently; and slowly reconstructed the world in which they lived. Beautifully written, Fowler’s memoir reveals what she eventually learned: of the perils and harships of submarine service in wartime, of the tragic irony of how her father’s sub was probably lost, and of the long-term damage experienced by the families of those who do not come home from war.
[more]

front cover of The Gift
The Gift
A Novel
Florence Noiville
Northwestern University Press, 2012
This moving fictional memoir begins as a woman heads home after a meeting regarding her inheritance. Rebeling against the legalese uttered by the attorney, her mind drifts back to her childhood and she sees her life with sudden clarity. On the train, she jots down a few notes, which prompt the poetic outpouring of memory and emotion that make up this delicate novel.

The narrator’s mother looms large in her psyche. Labeled “eccen­tric” or “Italian,” her mother in fact suffered from what was later found to be manic depression. Without understanding the disease, the fam­ily treated the unpredictable ups and downs of her condition as they struck. During periods of paralyzing depression she was hospitalized, and the family felt abandoned. During periods of manic productivity and overdrive, she was a dedicated pharmacist, an exemplary home­maker, and an unusually knowledgeable gardener. 

This sparse novel draws the portrait of a grand and unforgettable lady, loving and unable to love at once. Her bequest is as much a ma­terial one as it is an emotional one, and, the author surmises as she glances at her own daughters, a genetic one.
[more]

front cover of Giovanna's 86 Circles
Giovanna's 86 Circles
And Other Stories
Paola Corso
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

    These ten magical stories are primarily set in Pittsburgh-area river towns, where Italian American women and girls draw from their culture and folklore to bring life and a sense of wonder to a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt. Each story catapults the ordinary into something original and unpredictable.
    A skeptical journalist scopes out the bar where the town mayor, in seemingly perfect health, is drinking with his buddies and celebrating what he claims is the last day of his life. A woman donates her dead mother’s clothes to a thrift shop but learns that their destiny is not what she expected. A ten-year-old girl wrestles with the facts of life as she watches her neighbor struggle to get pregnant while her teenage sister finds it all too easy. A high school girl hallucinates in a steamy hospital laundry room and discovers she can see her coworkers’ futures. A developer’s wrecking ball is no match for the legend of Giovanna’s green thumb in the title story “Giovanna’s 86 Circles.”
    Quirky and profound, Corso’s magical leaps uncover the everyday poetry of these women’s lives.

Finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award


Selected for “Best Short Stories of 2005” in Montserrat Review

Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Sons of Italy National Book Club Selection
 

[more]

front cover of The Golden Hour
The Golden Hour
Sue Ellen Thompson
Autumn House Press, 2006
In Sue Ellen Thompson's fourth book of poems, the acclaimed poet explores relationships between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, the past and the present.
[more]

front cover of Holocaust Mothers and Daughters
Holocaust Mothers and Daughters
Family, History, and Trauma
Federica K. Clementi
Brandeis University Press, 2013
In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughters’ memoirs, which record the “all-too-human” qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, show that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. Clementi’s discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of trauma—individual, familial, and collective—among Jews in twentieth-century Europe.
[more]

front cover of The Hunger Book
The Hunger Book
A Memoir from Communist Poland
Agata Izabela Brewer
The Ohio State University Press, 2023

“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus

In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.

Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.

[more]

front cover of I Would Meet You Anywhere
I Would Meet You Anywhere
A Memoir
Susan Kiyo Ito
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

“Susan Kiyo Ito is like a surgeon operating on herself. She is delicate, precise, and at times cutting with her words. But it is all in service of her own healing and to encourage us all to be brave enough to do the same in our own stories.” —W. Kamau Bell

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.
[more]

front cover of If Mother Braids a Waterfall
If Mother Braids a Waterfall
Dayna Patterson
Signature Books, 2020

Dayna Patterson has produced a book obsessed with motherhood and daughterhood, ancestry, and transition—of home, family, faith, and the narratives woven to uphold the Self. In her debut collection of poetry and lyric essay, Patterson grapples with a patriarchal and polygamous heritage. After learning about her mother’s bisexuality, Patterson befriends doubt while simultaneously feeling the urge to unearth a feminist theology, one that envisions God the Mother taking pride in her place at the banquet table.

[more]

front cover of Imitation of Life
Imitation of Life
Fannie Hurst
Duke University Press, 2004
A bestseller in 1933, and subsequently adapted into two beloved and controversial films, Imitation of Life has played a vital role in ongoing conversations about race, femininity, and the American Dream. Bea Pullman, a white single mother, and her African American maid, Delilah Johnston, also a single mother, rear their daughters together and become business partners. Combining Bea’s business savvy with Delilah’s irresistible southern recipes, they build an Aunt Jemima-like waffle business and an international restaurant empire. Yet their public success brings them little happiness. Bea is torn between her responsibilities as a businesswoman and those of a mother; Delilah is devastated when her light-skinned daughter, Peola, moves away to pass as white. Imitation of Life struck a chord in the 1930s, and it continues to resonate powerfully today.

The author of numerous bestselling novels, a masterful short story writer, and an outspoken social activist, Fannie Hurst was a major celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Daniel Itzkovitz’s introduction situates Imitation of Life in its literary, biographical, and cultural contexts, addressing such topics as the debates over the novel and films, the role of Hurst’s one-time secretary and great friend Zora Neale Hurston in the novel’s development, and the response to the novel by Hurst’s friend Langston Hughes, whose one-act satire, “Limitations of Life” (which reverses the races of Bea and Delilah), played to a raucous Harlem crowd in the late 1930s. This edition brings a classic of popular American literature back into print.

[more]

front cover of Little Lost River
Little Lost River
A Novel
Pamela Johnston
University of Nevada Press, 2008
Set in Boise, Idaho in the early 1980s, Little Lost River is the story of two young women who come together in the wake of tragedy. Cindy Morgan is still reeling from the loss of her mother when an accident leaves her boyfriend missing and presumed drowned. When Frances Rogers happens upon the accident site, she stays with Cindy until help arrives. In the aftermath of that night’s events, as Cindy faces her future with a determination often misunderstood as indifference, Frances becomes her source of both support and compassion. Cindy and Frances are determined to find their own lives unencumbered by conventional expectations, but their path to adulthood is neither easy nor clear, and the future that each girl finds is not what she expected or planned. One generation follows another, and in the end, the girls learn that life moves on its own path, that “transformation is what takes you forward. It’s the only constant thing.”
[more]

front cover of Little Women
Little Women
An Annotated Edition
Louisa May Alcott
Harvard University Press, 2013

Little Women has delighted and instructed readers for generations. For many, it is a favorite book first encountered in childhood or adolescence. Championed by Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Theodore Roosevelt, and J. K. Rowling, it is however much more than the “girls’ book” intended by Louisa May Alcott’s first publisher. In this richly annotated, illustrated edition, Daniel Shealy illuminates the novel’s deep engagement with issues such as social equality, reform movements, the Civil War, friendship, love, loss, and of course the passage into adulthood.

The editor provides running commentary on biographical contexts (Did Alcott, like Jo, have a “mood pillow”?), social and historical contexts (When may a lady properly decline a gentleman’s invitation to dance?), literary allusions (Who is Mrs. Malaprop?), and words likely to cause difficulty to modern readers (What is a velvet snood? A pickled lime?). With Shealy as a guide, we appreciate anew the confusions and difficulties that beset the March sisters as they overcome their burdens and journey toward maturity and adulthood: beautiful, domestic-minded Meg, doomed and forever childlike Beth, selfish Amy, and irrepressible Jo. This edition examines the novel’s central question: How does one grow up well?

Little Women: An Annotated Edition offers something for everyone. It will delight both new and returning readers, young and old, male and female alike, who will want to own and treasure this beautiful edition full of color illustrations and photographs.

[more]

front cover of Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother
Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother
Rita Maria Magdaleno
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Her blood is both Aryan and Aztec and runs as deep as the waters between two worlds.

Rita Magdaleno was born near Dachau shortly after World War II to a German mother and a Mexican American GI. Her family moved to Arizona in 1947, and Rita was raised with her father's traditions—but she remains at heart a child of two cultures.

This poetic memoir, recalling Magdaleno's return to the land of her birth, is an intertwining of personal and public history, bridging continents and cultures in search of family secrets. Her poems recall a mother "Marlene Dietrich pretty, / her smoky voice / & those wide Aryan / eyes that promised / never to lie," a war bride who named her child after a Hollywood movie star even before casting eyes on America. They also offer a new, intimate view of the war—and of today's reunified Germany—and show that the consequences of events played out half a century ago continue to resonate with the children of that era.

Magdaleno navigates currents of emotion that would drown less capable poets. With patience, courage, and abiding love, she draws on memories of mother and motherland to show us that healing can come in many forms.

[more]

front cover of Mildred Pierce
Mildred Pierce
Edited by Albert J. La Valley; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980

Joan Crawford forged a new and successful screen image in this powerful women's noir film; winning her an Academy Award for best actress.

Albert J. LaValley's through and insightful guide to Mildred Pierce at once tells us much about the making of this complex film, the problems and process of transferring the story to the screen, the specific and important roles of the producer, director, and set designer, and how the film relates to broad trends within the industry. It is without a doubt the most thorough treatment of this important American motion picture.

[more]

front cover of Mother in Summer
Mother in Summer
Susan Hahn
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Mother in Summer is a collection of poems offering candid, powerful insight into the grief of losing a parent.
[more]

front cover of Motherhood Exaggerated
Motherhood Exaggerated
Judith Hannan
CavanKerry Press, 2012
In the past, the few memoirs about children battling cancer dealt mostly with death and grief. This passionate retelling by a survivor’s mother is about the struggle to help shepherd her child out of illness, towards health and through survival. Now that more children survive cancer, this passionate retelling by the survivor’s mother is required reading; the struggle of helping move the child out of illness.
[more]

logo for University of Iowa Press
My Ever Dear Daughter, My Own Dear Mother
The Correspondence of Julia Sonte Towne and Mary Julia Towne, 1868-1882
Katherine R. Morgan
University of Iowa Press, 1996
In 1868 twenty-two-year-old Mary Julia Towne left her farm in Topsfield, Massachusetts, for Chicago in search of better health and an opportunity to support herself. Soon she was teaching, first in night school and then in grammar schools, finding satisfaction and independence in this profession. Over the next fourteen years she wrote home to her mother, Julia Stone Towne; these letters and Julia's letters back to her—the only published collection of sustained correspondence between a nineteenth-century American mother and daughter—create a deep and rich world filled with the ideas, affection, advice, and comfort that each woman gave to the other. Now, more than a hundred years later, Julia and Mary Towne give us new insights into the complexities of life of women in the nineteenth century, into both the interdependence and the autonomy of mothers and daughters, and into the links between their lives and ours.
[more]

front cover of My Mother’s Funeral
My Mother’s Funeral
Adriana Páramo
CavanKerry Press, 2013
My Mother’s Funeral circles around the death of the author’s mother, but what also emerges is a landscape of personal loss and pain, of innocence, humor, violence and beauty. Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and Colombian heritage, Páramo describes the volatile bond linking mothers and daughters in a culture largely unknown to Americans. The book moves between past (Colombia in the 1940s) and present lives, and maps scenes both geographical (Bogotá, Medellín, Anchorage) as well as psychological--ultimately revealing the indomitable spirit of the women in her family. Especially from Páramo’s mother the reader learns what it means to be a Colombian woman.
[more]

front cover of My Mother'S Lovers
My Mother'S Lovers
(A Novel)
Joy Passanante
University of Nevada Press, 2002
Lake Rose Davis is the only child of former hippies who settled in a small Idaho mill town in the late 1960s. Her parents' eccentric lifestyle makes Lake an outcast among the children of the town, and the unspoken tensions among the adults of her parents' social universe puzzle and disturb her. She ponders over her mother's infidelities and the mysterious resentment between her mother and her grandparents far away in St. Louis, and between her mother and her aunt, a conventional career woman relentlessly in search of love.

As a teenager, Lake joins her grandparents in Missouri and spends her youth seeking answers to her questions about the past, trying to understand the complex pattern of betrayals that shaped it. Only when she herself becomes party to a betrayal as devastating as any committed by her mother does Lake begin to understand.

Passanante writes with a keen eye for the details of behavior that reveal the yearnings and fears beneath the surface. She shows us that the path to understanding is never a smooth one, and that love is often far more complex than we can imagine. Western Literature Series.

[more]

front cover of Night Burial
Night Burial
Kate Bolton Bonnici
University Press of Colorado, 2020
In Night Burial, Kate Bolton Bonnici mourns her mother’s death from ovarian cancer by tracing the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the maternal body. Opening with an epigraph from Julia Kristeva’s Stabat Mater, which recognizes the “abyss that opens up between the body and what had been its inside,” Night Burial moves from breastfeeding to laying sod on a grave, weaving together Alabama pine forests, fairy tales, philosophy, classical and Renaissance literatures, church practices, and hospice care. Through centuries-old and newly imagined poetic forms, Night Burial crafts a haunting litany for the dead. These poems ask the essential questions of grief, intertwined with family and place: how do we address the absent beloved and might the poem become its own conjuring whereby the I can once again speak to the you?
 
[more]

front cover of Process
Process
A Novel
A Novel by Kay Boyle
University of Illinois Press, 2006

front cover of Radiant Daughter
Radiant Daughter
A Novel
Patricia Grossman
Northwestern University Press, 2010

In Radiant Daughter, award-winning novelist Patricia Grossman follows

a Czech-American family for twenty-seven years, beginning in suburban

Chicago in 1969 and ending in Brooklyn, in seaside “Little Odessa,”

in 1996. Though the novel begins as a traditional assimilation story—

immigrant parents, “native” children, and the conflicts one might expect—

it evolves into a highly particular and harrowing tale surrounding

the descent of Elise Blazek, the family’s brightest star. Radiant Daughter

is also a story of translation—between generations, from the Czech of

Irena and Stepan, to the “American” of the children, and finally to the

Russian that is Elise’s academic specialty.

Radiant Daughter explores all that is human, from the most self-

destructive behavior to the highest forms of commitment and self-

sacrifice. Even at her lowest moments, Irena never loses her fierce

love for the daughter who has traveled so utterly beyond her reach.

For Elise, the future will always be complicated: a precarious balance

between periods of insight, bursts of accomplishment, and the abyss

of her illness.

Reminiscent, on the one hand, of the meticulously constructed

mother-daughter dynamic in Carol Shields’s Unless and, on the other,

of the anarchic real-life experience of Big and Little Edie Beale in Grey

Gardens, Grossman’s moving narrative breaks new ground in exploring

a dangerous turn in the complex bond between a mother and her adult

child.

[more]

front cover of 'Seventeen Syllables'
'Seventeen Syllables'
Hisaye Yamamoto
Edited by King-Kok Cheung
Rutgers University Press, 1994
Hisaye Yamamoto's often reprinted tale of a naive American daughter and her Japanese mother captures the essence the cultural and generational conflicts so common among immigrants and their American-born children. On the surface, "Seventeen Syllables" is the story of Rosie and her preoccupation with adolescent life. Between the lines, however, lurks the tragedy of her mother, who is trapped in a marriage of desperation. Tome's deep absorption in writing haiku causes a rift with her husband, which escalates to a tragic event that changes Rosie's life forever.

Yamamoto's disarming style matches the verbal economy of haiku, in which all meaning is contained within seventeen syllables. Her deft characterizations and her delineations of sexuality create a haunting story of a young girl's transformation from innocence to adulthood.

This casebook includes an introduction and an essay by the editor, an interview with the author, a chronology, authoritative texts of "Seventeen Syllables" (1949) and "Yoneko's Earthquake" (1951), critical essays, and a bibliography. The contributors are Charles L. Crow, Donald C. Goellnicht, Elaine H. Kim, Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald, Zenobia Baxter Mistri, Katharine Newman, Robert M. Payne, Robert T. Rolf, and Stan Yogi.
[more]

logo for University of North Texas Press
Singing Mother Home
A Psychologist's Journey through Anticipatory Grief
Donna S. Davenport
University of North Texas Press, 2002
What happens when an expert on grief is faced with the slow decline of her beloved mother? Like A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis, Singing Mother Home offers the reader an inside look at the struggles of someone who is an “expert” in coping with loss. Donna S. Davenport was forced to rethink the traditional academic approach to the process, which implied that the goal of grief resolution was to end the attachment to the loved one. Instead, she embarked on a personal exploration of her own anticipatory grief.

This intimate narrative forms the core of her book. It is emotionally wrenching, but it also provides hope for those going through similar experiences. Just as Davenport used her family's tradition of singing to comfort her mother, readers will be encouraged to find their own sources of comfort in family and legacy. The book concludes with two chapters describing psychological approaches to grief and recommending further reading.
[more]

front cover of This Country of Mothers
This Country of Mothers
Julianna Baggott
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

A mosaic of memories, the poems of This Country of Mothers recollect Julianna Baggott’s experiences as both mother and daughter. With wit, compassion, aggression, and anxiety, Baggott examines her maternal history. She recalls moments of creation and destruction in her life, times of elation and of desperation that mold her as both a woman and a poet. This affecting study of motherhood is framed in issues of Catholicism and of poetry itself, challenging and espousing the roles of both. Throughout her poems, Baggott’s personal experiences embrace universal themes to birth poems in a language and style that is both powerfully feminine and accessibly human.

[more]

front cover of The Water Between Us
The Water Between Us
Shara McCallum
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner.

The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal.
[more]

front cover of Worthy
Worthy
A Memoir
Denice Turner
University of Nevada Press, 2015
Worthy is a memoir of loss and the search for acceptance. Raised in a Mormon household, Denice Turner strives to find her place in the Church, longing to be worthy of her mother’s love. When her mother dies in a suspicious house fire, Turner is forced to face the problems with the stories she inherited. Contemplating the price of worthiness, Turner grapples with the mystery of her mother’s death, seeking to understand her mother’s battle with chronic pain.

The story unfolds as Turner confronts a history that includes a Greek grandfather whose up-from-the-bootstraps legacy refuses to die, the ghosts of two suicidal uncles, and a Mormon shrink who claims to see her dead relatives. In the end, this is a memoir not just about loss, but about all of the fragile human bonds that are broken in pursuit of perfection.

Wry and extraordinarily candid, Worthy will appeal to readers interested in the dynamics of family heritage, Mormon doctrine, and the subtle corrosive costs of shame.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter