Interweaving personal memoir and family history, this book traces one woman's search for her mother's lost childhood in Nazi-occupied Austria while revealing the resilience of our forebears and the sacrifices that ordinary people are called to make during history's darkest hours.

"After Danielle Geller's mother dies of a vicious withdrawal from drugs while homelessness, she is forced to return to Florida. Using her training as a librarian and archivist, Geller collects her mother's documents, diaries, and photographs into a single suitcase and begins on a journey of confronting her family, her harrowing past, and the decisions she's been forced to make, a journey that will end at her mother's home--the Navajo reservation....

Documents the author's investigation into her late mother's tragic experiences as an illegitimate orphan who endured an early life of discrimination, physical abuse and harsh labor serving England's ruling class at London's infamous Foundling Hospital.

"A memoir of motherhood, feminism, and family from a celebrated critic"--

"Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throesand dead calmof grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical...

"In this award-winning memoir, two sisters reckon with the convalescence and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humor and brutal honesty. When Vicki and her sister learn their mother has been hospitalized for a broken hip, they return to their parents' home in Alberta to put things back in order. Though their parents disowned them years before, the sisters now...

When her alcoholic and emotionally abusive mother's health declines, Joan Rough invites her to move in with her. Rough longs to be the "good daughter," helping her narcissistic mother face the reality of her coming death. But when repressed memories of childhood abuse by her mother arise, Rough is filled with deep resentment and hatred toward the woman who birthed her, and her dream of mending their tattered relationship shatters. Seven years later,...

"A daughter's remarkable and unflinching exploration of the unconventionally intimate relationship she shared with her mother--a brilliant and charismatic woman haunted by past trauma"--

"After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji's parents return to Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in the family's new California home. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself in a world made strange in her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters over the years seeking forgiveness and love-letters Eun Ji cannot understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. The letters lay bare the impact of her...

The popular recording artist sends a love letter to her mother in this memoir that recounts how her personal experience raising eight children was largely influenced by her kind, positive mother.