Her Mother S Daughter

Famed feminist Marilyn French’s life-affirming saga celebrates the love and sacrifices of four generations of Polish-American mothers and daughters. With Bella Dabrowski close to death, her daughter Anastasia, who has reinvented herself as Stacey Stevens, is trying to penetrate the longstanding barriers between them to understand the woman who gave her life. Through the eyes of Stacey, a divorced, feminist New York photographer, we get to know Bella, a remarkable woman, wife, and mother. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Bella, who renamed herself Belle, clawed her way out of poverty and settled into a middle-class existence. Shifting perspectives between the two women, the reader is drawn into Belle’s life through the lean years of the Depression as well as Stacey’s recollections of her youthful marriage, a lesbian affair, and her tempestuous relationship with her own daughter, Arden. From the groundbreaking author of The Women’s Room, Her Mother’s Daughter explores past and present to reveal the complex, indestructible bonds between daughters and mothers.

Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a a teenager and stayed away for years. Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother's Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A phenomenal, human story. . . . I could not put this book down." —CLARA HUGHES An instant national bestseller, this raw and affecting memoir is the story of a mother and daughter who beat the odds together. Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler running the biggest race of her life at the 2004 Olympics, she carried more than a nation's hopes—she carried her mother Catherine's dreams. In 1974, Catherine is determined and tenacious, but she's also pregnant with her second child and just scraping by in St. Lucia. When she meets a wealthy white Canadian family vacationing on the island, she knows it's her chance. They ask her to come to Canada to be their nanny—and she accepts. This was the beginning of Catherine's new life: a life of opportunity, but also suffering. Within a few years, she would find herself pregnant a third time—this time in her new country with no family to support her, and this time, with Perdita. Together, in the years to come, mother and daughter would experience racism, domestic abuse, and even homelessness, but Catherine's will would always pull them through. As Perdita grew and began to discover her preternatural athletic gifts, she was edged onward by her mother's love, grit, and faith. Facing literal and figurative hurdles, she learned to leap and pick herself back up when she stumbled. This book is a daughter's memoir—a book about the power of a parent's love to transform their child's life.

1980: Josephine escapes her home in Ireland, hoping never to return. She starts a new, exciting life in London, but as much as she tries, she can't quite leave the trauma of her childhood behind. Seventeen years and two children later, Josephine gets a call from her sister to tell her that their mother is dying and wants to see her - a summons she can't refuse. 1997: Ten-year-old Clare is counting down to the summer holidays, when she is going to meet her grandparents in Ireland for the first time. She hopes this trip will be 'just what the doctor ordered' and cheer her mum up. But family secrets can't stay buried forever and following revelations in Ireland Josephine and her family unravel, perhaps to the point of no return.

The daughter of esteemed writer Paula Fox and the mother of Courtney Love relates “the curse of the first-born daughter” that has haunted four generations of her family As an adopted child, Linda Carroll created a magical world of her own, made up of dramatic adventures and the abiding fantasy that her real mother would come and take her away. When she finds herself pregnant at the age of eighteen, she is determined to have the perfect understanding with her child that she lacked with her adoptive mother. But readers will know better, for that baby grows up to be Courtney Love, desperately attention-seeking, deeply troubled, and one of the most talented women in rock. Even as a baby, Courtney is beset by mood swings that no doctor can explain or cure. Her dark moods and paranoia escalate as she grows up, driving mother and daughter apart. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, Linda finally decides to find her own biological mother, and end the estrangement of generations of first-born daughters. Her Mother’s Daughter is Linda Carroll’s story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter, a childlike hippie mother, and a woman determined to find herself before finding her roots. Set apart from the typical celebrity memoir by Carroll’s gifted storytelling, Her Mother’s Daughter gives a fresh perspective on the elusive yet enduring connections between mothers and daughters, and reveals the true history of the wildly confabulatory Courtney Love.

Personal memories of the sort her Chatelaine readers adored — a remarkable life story seen through the window of her relationship with her mother. Every woman’s relationship with her mother is special. Yet everyone will recognize some parts of another woman’s story, especially if it is told as honestly and as sensitively as Rona Maynard tells it here. As a little girl, Maynard soon came to see that her family was not an ordinary one. Her father, Max, was an artist and an alcoholic. Her mother was Fredelle Maynard, a brilliant academic who could not get a teaching job because she was a woman. Instead she became a writer — the author of Raisins and Almonds — and, above all, a driving, loving, ambitious, overpowering mother. In her shadow (and that of younger sister Joyce, who went off at eighteen to live with J.D. Salinger) Rona took time to blossom as a writer and editor in Toronto. This book takes us through her career, step by step, including the miseries of being accused by her son’s teachers — and her own mother — of being a bad mother, overly concerned with her own career. Rona’s strong, direct style will ring true for every working woman. Through the magic of her writing, she gives a clear-eyed and affectionate account of her relationship with a demanding, loving mother. I said to my father, "You don’t live here any more. This is Mother’s house, not yours. It’s time for you to go." My father cursed me. He shook his fist. Then he left and never came back. —From My Mother’s Daughter

Becoming My Mother’s Daughter: A Story of Survival and Renewal tells the story of three generations of a Jewish Hungarian family whose fate has been inextricably bound up with the turbulent history of Europe, from the First World War through the Holocaust and the communist takeover after World War II, to the family’s dramatic escape and emmigration to Canada. The emotional centre and narrative voice of the story belong to Eva, an artist, dreamer, and writer trying to work through her complex and deep relationship with her mother, whose portrait she cannot paint until she completes her journey through memory. The core of the book is Eva’s riveting recollection of the last months of World War II in Budapest, seen through a child’s eyes, and is reminiscent in its power of scenes in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. Exploring the bond between generations of mothers and daughters, the book illustrates the struggle between the need for independence and the search for continuity, the significant impact of childhood on adult life, the reshaping of personality in immigration, the importance of dreams in making us face reality, and the redemptive power of memory. Illustrations by the author throughout the book, some in colour, enhance the story.

"Why didn't you and Daddy want people to give you any wedding presents?" I used to ask. But my mother could never be drawn into talking about the wedding. Later, I assumed it was because she did not wish to be reminded of the ghastly mistake she had made in marrying my father. Born in Australia in 1949, author Nadia Wheatley grew up with a sense of the mystery of her parents’ marriage. Caught in the crossfire between an independent woman and a controlling man, the child became a player in the deadly game. Was she her mother’s daughter, or her father’s creature? After her mother’s death, the ten-year-old began writing down the stories her mother had told her—of a Cinderella-like childhood, followed by an escape into a career as an army nurse in Palestine and Greece, and as an aid-worker in the refugee camps of post-war Germany. Some fifty years later, the finished memoir is not only a loving tribute but an investigation of the bewildering processes of memory itself. Nadia Wheatley is an Australian writer whose publications range from biography and history to fiction and picture books. Her biography The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift was the Age Book of the Year, Non-fiction, and is the only biography to have won the Australian History Prize, NSW Premier's History Awards. ‘One of the greatest Australian biographies...a work which never confuses itself with fiction but which has the same readability and flair and command of tempo. It’s a hell of a story.’ Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald on The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. ‘Outstanding...a rare feat in Australian literary biography.’ Weekend Australian on The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift ‘An important addition to the history of Australian social life and a vivid insight into how individual people can be controlled by repressive social attitudes. Wheatley reminds us of the difference between how family life is supposed to be and how it is actually experienced.’ Inside Story ‘In a moving and beautifully written memoir, Wheatley brings to life her mother’s adventures...My bet is that this fascinating book will prove to be an award-winner. Highly recommended.’ Courier-Mail ‘[Her] Mother’s Daughter is one of the most devastating examples of gaslighting that I have ever read. It is not only a beautiful rendering of an “ordinary” life, it is also a significant social history of wartime Europe and post-war Australia.’ Australian ‘Her Mother's Daughter is a great read for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a thoughtful, authentic - sometimes exciting, sometimes disturbing - social history of the times. And secondly, with Wheatley's ability to write engaging narratives, it makes for engrossing, moving, provocative reading. I do recommend it.’ Whispering Gums