Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir
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Melissa Cistaro. (2015). Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir. Sourcebooks.

Melissa Cistaro. 2015. Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir. Sourcebooks.

Melissa Cistaro, Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir. Sourcebooks, 2015.

Melissa Cistaro. Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir. Sourcebooks, 2015.

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Pieces of My Mother

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Pieces of My Mother A Memoir

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23. • value: books on motherhoods
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30. • value: cirrhosis
31. • value: Liver Cancer
32. • value: absent mother
33. • value: baby-blue
34. • value: books on cirrhoses
35. • value: books on edelman
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37. • value: books on liver cancers
38. • value: books on olympia
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Cistaro, Melissa
   • bioText:

     Melissa Cistaro is a bookseller and the events coordinator at Book Passage, the legendary San Francisco Bay Area independent bookstore, where she has hosted more than 200 authors. A writer and mother of two, she has been interviewed on a number of radio shows and has been published in numerous literary journals including the New Ohio Review, Anderbo.com, and Brevity as well as in two anthologies alongside Anne Lamott, Jane Smiley, and other writers. Melissa graduated with honors from UCLA and continued her education with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She has participated in the Tin House Writer's Workshop in Portland and The Writer's Studio in Los Angeles. She lives in San Francisco.

   • name: Melissa Cistaro

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title

Pieces of My Mother

fullDescription

"A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." —HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything

This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents?

One summer, Melissa Cistaro's mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them?

Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks.

Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman's quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa's tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother's final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents' choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Will Schwalbe, bestselling author of The End Of Your Life Book Club
   • content: "This is an astonishing book, full of heartbreak and love and hard-won wisdom. Melissa Cistaro writes beautifully not just about her search for the mother who abandoned her, but about the myriad ways parents and children don't and do connect. Told in vivid scenes and through the texts of letters her mother never sent, Cistaro chronicles a journey that goes way past forgiveness to true understanding."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Kelly Corrigan, bestselling memoirist of The Middle Place, Lift, and Glitter & Glue
   • content: "Sometimes we are defined as much by the person who is missing as the person who is there. Melissa Cistaro has a story to tell and one you don't hear every day. I was deeply moved from word one."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Hope Edelman, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything
   • content: "Melissa Cistaro's imagery is startling and vivid, her story brutally honest and devoid of judgment. Pieces of My Mother is a story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Monica Holloway, bestselling author of Cowboy & Wills and Driving with Dead People
   • content: "Full of hope, regret and lessons learned, Pieces of My Mother is a unique and compelling look at how profoundly mothers affect our lives. Whether absent or hauntingly close, longing for a mother can force a child into maturity beyond her years, and garner her with a lifetime of longing. This book is as lyrical as it is honest, as humorous as it is heartbreaking."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Sahar's Reviews
   • content: "Heartbreaking in its simplicity, Pieces of My Mother is Melissa Cistaro's attempt to shed some much needed light on her dark past...a tentative, poignant, painful exploration that welcomes complexity, forgiveness, and empathy. "
6. • premium: False
   • source: Elaine Petrocelli, Book Passage, San Francisco, CA
   • content: "Weeks after I read the last gorgeous page of Pieces of My Mother, I still find myself thinking about Melissa Cistaro and her complex, maddening and fascinating mother. What caused this woman to walk out of her house one afternoon, leaving the children she loved behind? As Melissa puts the pieces together we are treated to an outstanding memoir written with tenderness, wit and depth. "
7. • premium: False
   • source: April Gosling, Boulder Bookstore (Boulder, CO)
   • content: "At three, Cistaro watched her mother sob in the driver's seat of her car through the window in her bedroom. Minutes later, her mother drove off, removing herself from the traditional role.
     
     Thirty six years later, Cistaro leaves her family on Christmas Day to sit by her mother's bedside as she succumbs to cirrhosis. Challenged to piece together a woman she barely knows, Cistaro takes the reader into her world, her story. Weaving between Now and Then, Cistaro tells of life with and without her mother. And without her."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Suzy Staubach, U Conn Co-op (Storrs, CT)
   • content: "Truly wonderful. Not your typical dysfunctional family memoir. I thought the structure - alternating scenes of her dyeing mother with the past was brilliant."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Lolly Winston, bestselling author of Good Grief and Happiness Sold Separately
   • content: "Filled with moments of poignancy and grace, Melissa Cistaro's beautiful book lands on a gorgeous note of redemption. I loved it."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Tom Barbash, critically acclaimed author of Stay Up With Me and the New York Times bestseller On Top of the World
    • content: "Pieces of My Mother is part memoir, part detective story, and throughout its pages riveting to read... A brave and impressive debut."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Barbara Abercrombie, author of A Year of Writing Dangerously
    • content: "Melissa Cistaro's luminous memoir is full of heart, wisdom and suspense...a page turner, impossible to put down. It's also filled with the kind of writing that makes you catch your breath in awe."
12. • premium: False
    • source: New York Times Bestselling author Ayelet Waldman
    • content: "Melissa Cistaro has written a vivid and unforgettable first memoir. She writes with true compassion, exposing the delicate, complicated bond between mothers and daughters."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Abigail Thomas, bestselling author of A Three Dog Life, Safekeeping, and What Comes Next and How to Like It
    • content: "Melissa Cistaro has written the perfect memoir. I love this book."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Peter Orner, author of Last Car Over Sagamore Bridge, Love And Shame and Love And Esther Stories
    • content: "In an age where the pressure to be the perfect parent is beyond fierce, enter Melissa Cistaro with a clear-eyed look at a real family. It's about how it is to be a mother and a daughter in the imperfect world we all actually live in. A heartbreaking and heart affirming first book."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Chery McKeon, Manager, Book Passage
    • content: "Detailed memories, honest reflection, and true insights into her mother's life combine in this spell-binding memoir of what it means to be a loving mother and a good daughter."
16. • premium: False
    • source: Katie Hafner, author of Mother Daughter Me
    • content: "I read this book in one uninterrupted, lump-in-the-throat sitting. Equal parts memoir and emotional whodunnit, Pieces of My Mother is a beautiful, wrenching story, meticulously crafted. Cistaro understands all too...
17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 23, 2015
      An undercurrent of unresolved hurt and anger runs through this affecting and deeply restrained narrative of a mother’s abandonment of her children. San Francisco bookseller Cistaro alternates between 2003, when the author, the mother of two small children in L.A., was summoned suddenly over Christmas to her dying mother’s rural home in Olympia, and the 1970s, when Cistaro and her two brothers were growing up in the care of their overburdened father. Cistaro was four when her hard-drinking, chain-smoking mother took off from their San Jose duplex in her baby-blue Dodge Dart to “take a break” from the responsibilities of her vivacious sons and daughter. Subsequently, the children rarely saw their mother, who lived from one boyfriend to the next, working occasionally as a cocktail hostess. They blamed themselves for making her leave, and while the boys spiraled into drug and alcohol abuse, the author became the “good girl” who never begged or made a scene. As her mother lay dying, Cistaro found a cache of “Letters never sent” in her mother’s house, and though they help Cistaro sift through the wounded memories, there is no tidy reckoning between mother and daughter in this sad cycle of emotional devastation.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 15, 2015
      A debut memoir about a woman's emotionally charged relationship with the mother who walked away from her marriage and family.The youngest of three children, Cistaro was barely out of toddlerhood when her mother got into her Dodge Dart and suddenly drove off. She neither called nor acknowledged her children's birthdays for the first few years of her absence. Only later would she connect with them, but only for short periods of time. When she did, it was often in the company of different men with whom she shared homes as well as alcohol and drugs. Cistaro's mother was constantly-and painfully-"just out of...reach" of the children who craved her love. The author and her brothers became each other's main sources of support, and their father did his imperfect best to hold the family together. However, the children each carried a deep anguish that marked them for life. Both her brothers eventually became substance abusers, while Cistaro narrowly avoided a similar fate. She went on to build a happy, stable marriage and family, but privately, she lived with the constant fear that she carried a "leaving gene" that would cause her to want to abandon her own family. When she learned one Christmas that her mother was dying, all her old fears of being left behind resurfaced. The author went to her mother's side to "hold [the] body" she had not touched since childhood. During her stay, she discovered letters her mother had written but not sent to Cistaro and her brothers. From them, she gained insight into the powerfully contradictory impulses that drove her mother and that often surfaced in herself. The author finally found peace knowing that while her mother ultimately needed to fly free, Cistaro could embrace "the messy, maddening beauty" that responsibilities brought to her life with equanimity and even joy. An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships.

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 15, 2015
      When Cistaro was only four, her mother abandoned the family, leaving three young children behind. In this memoir broken into sections depicting Then and Now, Cistarovisiting her dying motherreflects on her own life and her mother's. While looking after her bedridden mother, Cistaro also pores over her mother's unmailed letters, some to her, many to others, and works to develop a picture of a woman who could give up her children to tour Europe, hang out with men and friends, and only occasionally visit the fast-growing, unhappy, troubled youngsters she left behind. This is a tale of seeking and hoping for forgiveness and enlightenment. Cistaro's prose is not maudlin but questing. Though she may not find all the answers she needs, she returns, stronger, to her own family, perhaps understanding her mother's hope of her recognizing . . . the person I am as opposed to the figure I am supposed to represent. A poignant exploration of choices and their reverberations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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"A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." —HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything

This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents?

One summer, Melissa Cistaro's mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them?

Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she...

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Pieces of My Mother A Memoir

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Sourcebooks

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