“I’m reading this book right now and loving it!”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of WildHow can a mother and daughter who love (but don’t always like) each other coexist without driving each other crazy? “Vibrating with emotion, this deeply honest account strikes a chord.”—People“A wry and moving meditation on aging and the different kinds of love between women.”—O: The Oprah … on aging and the different kinds of love between women.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
After surviving a traumatic childhood in nineteen-seventies New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, still orbiting around her mother but keeping far enough away to preserve the stable, independent world she has built as a writer and editor. Then Elissa is confronted with the unthinkable: Rita, whose days are spent as a flâneur, traversing Manhattan from the Clinique counters at Bergdorf to Bloomingdale’s and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall, leaving her completely dependent upon her daughter.
Now Elissa is forced to finally confront their profound differences, Rita’s yearning for beauty and glamour, her view of the world through her days in the spotlight, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of preserving youth. To sustain their fragile mother-daughter bond, Elissa must navigate the turbulent waters of their shared lives, the practical challenges of caregiving for someone who refuses to accept it, the tentacles of narcissism, and the mutual, frenetic obsession that has defined their relationship.
Motherland is a story that touches every home and every life, mapping the ferocity of maternal love, moral obligation, the choices women make about motherhood, and the possibility of healing. Filled with tenderness, wry irreverence, and unforgettable characters, it is an exploration of what it means to escape from the shackles of the past only to have to face them all over again.
Praise for Motherland
“Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. Elissa Altman is a beautiful, big-hearted writer who mines her most central subject: her gorgeous, tempestuous, difficult mother, and the terrain of their shared life. The result is a testament to the power of love and family.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
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I’m reading this book right now and loving it!
Elissa Altman’s Motherland traces the history of a particularly complicated relationship. Wise, evocative, and rich in insight, this compassionate and beautiful memoir is ultimately an act of love.
A beautiful, painful and honest memoir about the deepest, often convoluted, sometimes gut-wrenching relationship in a woman’s life: that with her mother. In Elissa Altman’s case, surviving her narcissistic mother takes some exquisite navigation to approach the shore without being dashed on the rocks. Ultimately, though bearing invisible battle scars, Altman emerges to share a powerful story, one with love at its core. An unforgettable read.
Interesting recounting of a complicated mother-daughter relationship where the mother is extremely difficult, no doubt, suffering from multiple disorders. The author’s unbounded love and commitment to her mother throughout her life is remarkable. Altman is an able author, weaving a non-linear tale, of her mother, her father and her grandparents, and her own life, seeking understanding of why her mother is the way she is. She deftly makes the reader “see” the scenes she paints, sometimes in snippets, and evokes the emotions of the moment–the frustration, the anger, the disbelief, even the love–unconditional love. Honest and raw, at times, she endeavors to explain the inexplicable mother-daughter bind.
Motherland is the type of memoir I absolutely love, not constrained by chronology, it works the way memory works when we try to make meaning of the past and to understand the most fundamental relationships. Altman’s language and imagery is pristine and carried me through the book with many a smile of recognition. I kept this book on my bedside table, picking it up for slivers before sleep, prolonging it’s wisdom and haunting message. As a grown daughter and mother of a daughter, a memoir like Motherland is a gift to those of us intent on forgiveness and moving forward.
Elissa Altman tells the astonishing and poignant story of her troubled relationship with a narcissistic mother. It’s beautifully written–alternately funny and tragic. I loved it.
An instant classic, I inhaled this mother-daughter memoir, stopping only to re-read exquisite lines or sit with a profound truth. Elissa Altman has created a masterpiece; a tangled story packed with despair and devotion and everything in between.
In Motherland, Elissa Altman brilliantly untwists her own lifelong passionate-but-fraught mother-daughter helix. Beautifully written, infused with humor, sorrow, and hard-won clarity, this memoir is a triumph of writerly and daughterly empathy. The ending moved me to tears.
With all the warmth, candor, and intelligence of her previous memoirs, Elissa Altman now turns her miss-nothing observational skills on the most complicated of relationships—that between daughter and mother. The resulting story, of a mother most bedeviling and a daughter doing everything she can to save herself without losing her oldest tie, is a triumph of sensitivity and a truly compelling read.
Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. Elissa Altman is a beautiful, big-hearted writer who mines her most central subject: her gorgeous, tempestuous, difficult mother, and the terrain of their shared life. The result is a testament to the power of love and family.