Mothers and Daughters: From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a captivating family drama

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In both McCracken’s The Hero of This Bookand Tillman’s Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence, daughters try to transcribe the discordant emotions provoked by a mother’s decline and death. Paula sets out to find her mother and discover the truth about her family and past in this novel (and audiobook) driven by both mysteries and Paula’s own emotional journey. Indie was seven that year—the two of us riveted by the story’s mystery, but mostly drawn to reading about a relationship and a life like ours—a mother stealing supplies from work to cut costs; the way Miranda doesn’t “see” the barrenness of her home until she’s the homes of her friends; the ways they look out for each other.

Martha is in a stable satisfying marriage and Willow is finally with a man that is viewed as perfect boyfriend material by the rest of the family. The youngest and the most indecisive, who drifts along in life not really having a Willow is easy going, caring and loving and just ambles through life changing jobs and boyfriends, her father found that so frustrating and was very open to letting her know that she needed to make some plans and be more like Martha. At the same time, the situations rang true to life and I could imagine my sisters, or my daughters reacting similarly. I was, therefore, more than a little surprised by how much I enjoyed reading Mothers and Daughters – a salutary lesson in not judging a book by its cover!Her and her sister spent their time watching their loving mother bounce from tenderness to bitterness and back again, always waiting for her unpredictable nature to show. One year, I gave my mother Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in hopes that the novel would speak for me, say what I couldn’t say— I could understand you better if I knew you more, if I knew what you went through, before me. I enjoyed seeing Willow and Martha come together as sisters, and then become accepting of their mother’s decisions. Easy-going drifter, Willow, has finally met a new boyfriend in Rick, whom her family seem to approve of, so why doesn’t she too feel convinced by his obvious overtures to settle down?

What the persona in these essays never has to wonder about is her mother’s love for her and in turn, her love for her mother. In addition to the simple physiological and genetic bond that connects parents to their children, there is also a deeply rooted and often conflicting emotional bond that develops between mothers and daughters. When my mother died in 2018, my grief was compounded by how much I didn’t know about my mother, of my mother, and when I had a daughter in 2002, I knew I wanted my daughter to know me, the girl I had been, the young woman I missed, yet often regretted, and the woman I am, as me, as Jill, the woman beyond her mother. On reflection, I think it is quite interesting that an older character in the story connected with me the most.Their story connects with that of another mother, Nandini, as her daughter Asha learns the truth of her adoption. The narrator may or may not be McCracken’s stand-in; the author likes to bat at the line between fiction and fact like a cat attacking string. A few weeks later, Indie read it, crying at the end as I had, once again recognizing the two of us on the page in someone else’s story. This was my first read of an Erica James book and I was impressed with the emotionally powerful storylines and how grounded in reality the whole story proved to be, along with how well-drawn and flawed the characters were.

It’s a mesmerizing portrait of Brodeur’s mother—a vivacious woman with allure and an affinity for creating feasts “whose aromas alone would entice ships full of men onto the rocks, where she would delight in watching them plumb into the abyss,” identifying her mother as akin to the Sirens of Greek mythology. The memoir begins on a night when Brodeur’s parents host a cocktail hour and dinner with her father’s best friend and his wife, a night that ends when Brodeur’s mother wakes her daughter, then fourteen, to confide in what would be the beginning of an affair. Mounds of junk come down from the top of a cabinet, Le Creuset pans from the late 1970s, enamelware received as a wedding present in 1959, all coated in “the dense gray matter that accumulates in an old house with cats in it, opaque and oddly damp.

Perhaps because Naomi is presented as so caring and selfless, in contrast to Willow and Martha’s sometimes selfish or erratic behaviours. Her mother’s were “small and weird and dear,” and indeed, those are good words for the woman herself. In this classic he traces the representation of the feminine from the beginning of image-making in caves via mythological storytelling to monotheistic religions. With wit and sensitivity, this novel explores the painful and tender connection between mothers and daughters.