Tag Archives: mothers
*** Why be Happy when you could be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir by the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit — in which we discover that her own childhood was not all that different of that of her heroine, … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin
An aging mom who has slaved away all her life for her mostly ungrateful family, including a philandering husband, gets lost in the big city and is never found again. This is the premise for Please Look After Mom and … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
** Poser by Claire Dederer
I liked Poser a lot, even with its ominous, hokey, and true subtitle of My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses, true since each chapter is indeed named after a yoga pose and the author does pace through her life as … Continue reading
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* Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
Where do I start? Left Neglected is the story of a driven executive with three children who, after a car crash suffers from a neurological problem that leaves her unable to see anything on the left or even control the … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
** Bound by Antonya Nelson
Bound is a clever tapestry of seemingly unrelated stories that somehow come together – almost but not quite. There’s a brilliantly captured teenager who loses her mother and makes her own way, a ditzy older woman who somehow rises to … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott
How I loved Anne Lamott’s Grace (Eventually) and Operating Instructions. Alas, Imperfect Birds simply bored me. Perhaps it’s because it’s a novel, and the same themes that work so well as a journal — life in granola Marin County, struggling … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Follow Me by Joanna Scott
Follow Me follows a teenage single mother who abandons her newborn baby on her parents’ kitchen table for a new life, as told by her granddaughter. The trouble is that the main character is simply not very interesting; she lives … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Not Becoming my Mother by Ruth Reichl
Not Becoming My Mother is a sweet and sad paean to the author’s mother, who was a smart, career-minded woman forced by the era she lived in as well as her parents to content herself to be a wife and … Continue reading
Filed under True story
American Rust by Philipp Meyer
American Rust is a bleak story of a bleak town, which in the past had a flourishing steel mill that provided good-paying jobs but now consists of only the old, the young, and the defeated. Everyone else has left to … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Accidentally, on Purpose by Mary Pols
Accidentally, on Purpose is Mary Pols’s father’s apt characterization of how she got pregnant: without meaning to, certainly, but very much wanting to. After a one-night stand with an unsuitable man (too young, too lowly-employed, too apathetic) she decides to … Continue reading
Filed under True story
