Download or read book Memoirs of a Mother written by Ayeta Anne Wangusa and published by Femrite Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Ugandan woman, Elizabeth Sera tries to balance respectability and love, and painfully finds the need to assert her individuality against social norms.
Download or read book Pieces of My Mother written by Melissa Cistaro and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Make Me a Mother written by Susanne Antonetta and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates how the author and her husband adopted a six-month-old boy from South Korea and the lessons they had to learn as parents, including how to incorporate aspects of another culture and how to discuss birth parents with their son.
Download or read book Crossing the River written by Carol Smith and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful exploration of grief and resilience following the death of the author's son that combines memoir, reportage, and lessons in how to heal Everyone deals with grief in their own way. Helen Macdonald found solace in training a wild goshawk. Cheryl Strayed found strength in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. For Carol Smith, a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist struggling with the sudden death of her seven-year-old son, Christopher, the way to cross the river of sorrow was through work. In Crossing the River, Smith recounts how she faced down her crippling loss through reporting a series of profiles of people coping with their own intense challenges, whether a life-altering accident, injury, or diagnosis. These were stories of survival and transformation, of people facing devastating situations that changed them in unexpected ways. Smith deftly mixes the stories of these individuals and their families with her own account of how they helped her heal. General John Shalikashvili, once the most powerful member of the American military, taught Carol how to face fear with discipline and endurance. Seth, a young boy with a rare and incurable illness, shed light on the totality of her son's experiences, and in turn helps readers see that the value of a life is not measured in days. Crossing the River is a beautiful and profoundly moving book, an unforgettable journey through grief toward hope, and a valuable, illuminating read for anyone coping with loss.
Download or read book Mother written by Nicholas Royle and published by Myriad Editions. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writer's skill and generosity of spirit.' —Hilary Mantel Before the devastating 'loss of her marbles', Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously, swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of literature and of wildlife that will form his character and his career. In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother, whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son—Royle's younger brother—to cancer in his twenties. At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on climate crisis and 'mother nature', on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself.
Download or read book When Every Day Matters written by Mary Jane Brant and published by . This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her courageous book, Brant chronicles the first year of living without her beloved daughter who died of brain cancer. She shares not only the story of a life lost through tragedy, but the legacy of a renewed life filled with grace, compassion, wisdom, and choice.
Download or read book Mothers of Sparta written by Dawn Davies and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Davies' collection of essays soars.... It's a memoir that locates the profound within the ordinary.” —Entertainment Weekly If you’re looking for a typical parenting book, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is a book about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift twenty-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth). Alone in a new city, she summons her inner strength as she holds the hand of a dying stranger. Davies is a woman who finds humor in difficult pregnancies and post-partum depression (after reading “Pie” you might never eat Thanksgiving dessert the same way). She is a divorcee who unexpectedly finds second love. She is a happily married suburban wife who nevertheless makes a mental list of all the men she would have slept with. And she is a parent who finds herself tested in ways she could never imagine. In stories that cut to the quick, Davies explores passion, loss, illness, pain, and joy, told from her singular, gimlet-eyed, hilarious perspective. Mothers of Sparta is not a blow-by-blow of Davies’ life but rather an examination of the exquisite and often painful moments of a life, the moments we look back on and say, That one, that one mattered. Straddling the fence between humor and, well...not humor, Davies has written a book about what it’s like to try to carve a place for oneself in the world, no matter how unyielding the rock can be.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Mother in Law written by George R. Sims and published by Alma Classics. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Tressider has never been afraid of speaking her mind, even if she admits that she may have occasionally given offence by doing so. But as a busy mother of nine children, she cannot let such a small foible get in the way of her job, which is to keep her feckless husband on his toes while ensuring the perfect management not just of her own household but also of that of her married daughters and sons. Since mothers-in-law have always been misunderstood and no one has ever taken up their side of the argument properly, Jane is determined to set the record straight and plead the cause of the most maligned race on the face of the earth. The result is a hilarious comedy of manners and a gentle satire of Edwardian mores and attitudes.
Download or read book My Mother s Daughter written by Perdita Felicien and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Bright Hour written by Nina Riggs and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Built on her ... Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a ... memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38-year-old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson--mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years--after her terminal cancer diagnosis"--
Download or read book Diary of a Stage Mother s Daughter written by Melissa Francis and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Glass Castle meets The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in this dazzlingly honest and provocative family memoir by former child actress and current Fox Business Network anchor Melissa Francis. When Melissa Francis was eight years old, she won the role of lifetime: playing Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the little girl who was adopted with her brother (played by young Jason Bateman) by the Ingalls family on the world's most famous primetime soap opera, Little House on the Prairie. Despite her age, she was already a veteran actress, living a charmed life, moving from one Hollywood set to the next. But behind the scenes, her success was fueled by the pride, pressure, and sometimes grinding cruelty of her stage mother, as fame and a mother's ambition pushed her older sister deeper into the shadows. Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter is a fascinating account of life as a child star in the 1980's, and also a startling tale of a family under the care of a highly neurotic, dangerously competitive "tiger mother." But perhaps most importantly, now that Melissa has two sons of her own, it's a meditation on motherhood, and the value of pushing your children: how hard should you push a child to succeed, and at what point does your help turn into harm?
Download or read book Mother Winter written by Sophia Shalmiyev and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lyrical and emotionally gutting." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Intellectually satisfying [and] artistically profound.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW) “Mesmeric.”—THE PARIS REVIEW “Vividly awesome and truly great." —EILEEN MYLES “Gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable." —LENI ZUMAS “Brilliant.” —MICHELLE TEA An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her. Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking lyrical memoir. To understand the end of her story, we must go back to the beginning. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where anti-Semitism and an imbalance of power were omnipresent in her home. At just eleven years old, Shalmiyev’s father stole her away to America, forever abandoning her estranged alcoholic mother, Elena. Motherless on a tumultuous voyage to the states, terrified in a strange new land, Shalmiyev depicts in urgent, poetic vignettes her emotional journeys through an uncharted world as an immigrant, artist, and, eventually, as a mother of two. As an adult, Shalmiyev voyages back to Russia to search endlessly for the mother she never knew—in her pursuit, we witness an arresting, impassioned meditation on art-making, gender politics, displacement, and most potently, motherhood.
Download or read book What We Carry written by Maya Shanbhag Lang and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A gorgeous memoir about mothers, daughters, and the tenacity of the love that grows between what is said and what is left unspoken.”—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk If our family stories shape us, what happens when we learn those stories were never true? Who do we become when we shed our illusions about the past? Maya Shanbhag Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished physician who immigrated to the United States from India and completed her residency all while raising her children and keeping a traditional Indian home. Maya’s mother had always been a source of support—until Maya became a mother herself. Then the parent who had once been so capable and attentive became suddenly and inexplicably unavailable. Struggling to understand this abrupt change while raising her own young child, Maya searches for answers and soon learns that her mother is living with Alzheimer’s. Unable to remember or keep track of the stories she once told her daughter—stories about her life in India, why she immigrated, and her experience of motherhood—Maya’s mother divulges secrets about her past that force Maya to reexamine their relationship. It becomes clear that Maya never really knew her mother, despite their close bond. Absorbing, moving, and raw, What We Carry is a memoir about mothers and daughters, lies and truths, receiving and giving care, and how we cannot grow up until we fully understand the people who raised us. It is a beautiful examination of the weight we shoulder as women and an exploration of how to finally set our burdens down. Praise for What We Carry "Part self-discovery, part family history. . . [Lang's] analysis of the shifting roles of mothers and daughters, particularly through the lens of immigration, help[s] to challenge her family’s mythology. . . . Readers interested in examining their own family stories . . . will connect deeply with Lang’s beautiful memoir."—Library Journal (Starred Review) “A stirring memoir exploring the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters . . . astutely written and intense . . . [What We Carry] will strike a chord with readers.”—Publishers Weekly “Lang is an immediately affable and honest narrator who offers an intriguing blend of revelatory personal history and touching insight.”—BookPage
Download or read book A Mother for All Seasons written by Debbie Phelps and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unsinkable Debbie Phelps—who captured the hearts of the world when her son, Michael, triumphed at the Beijing Olympic games—shares her inspirational story A Mother for All Seasons is the heartfelt, intimate memoir of an everywoman—a single mom and an educator who raised three exceptional children, including the greatest Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps. During the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, when Michael achieved the impossible with his record-shattering eight gold-medal wins, Debbie Phelps nearly stole the show. For the millions who were riveted to the most watched Olympics in history, few could forget the homage that Michael consistently paid to the one person on Team Phelps most responsible for making it all possible: his mom. Nor can we forget how after each medal ceremony, Michael walked proudly to the stands to reach up to his mother and his sisters, Hilary and Whitney, to deliver his winning bouquets to them. While those highlights will forever be remembered the world over, very few know the behind-the-scenes stories as lived by the members of Team Phelps—a roller-coaster ride full of dramatic ups and downs, heartbreaks, and disappointments, yet one guided to triumph by vision, courage, and tenacity. Now at last, in A Mother for All Seasons, we're given the untold story as lived by the mom on the team. An educator in home economics, motivational spokeswoman, visionary middle-school principal, mother of three, and grandmother of two, Debbie Phelps is also the eternal cheerleader who was raised in a small, blue-collar, working-class town. An avid believer that achievement is limitless for each and every child, no matter the odds, Debbie reveals the universal themes of her story, which is rich with struggle, humor, hope, advice, and passion. Infused with the indomitable spirit of “America's mom,” as she has been called, A Mother for All Seasons rallies us to cheer for all of our children at every stage of their growth and in every endeavor. Candid, lively, and charming, it offers timely, commonsense wisdom, lessons, and insights, and provides a much-needed reminder that life doesn't always turn out how you plan it, but in fact it can sometimes turn out even better.
Download or read book The Cookie Cure written by Susan Stachler and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heartwarming memoir of a family that refused to give up When twenty-two-year-old Susan Stachler was diagnosed with cancer, her mother, Laura, was struck by déjà vu: the same illness that took her sister's life was threatening to take her daughter's too. Heartbroken but steadfast, Laura pledged to help Susan through the worst of her treatments. When they discovered that Laura's homemade ginger cookies soothed the side effects of Susan's chemo, the mother-daughter duo soon found themselves opening Susansnaps and sharing their gourmet gingersnaps with the world. Told with admirable grace and infinite hope, The Cookie Cure is about more than baked goods and cancer—it's about fighting for your life and for your dreams.
Download or read book Motherhood Memoirs written by Nicole L. Willey and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors in this collection examine and critique motherhood memoir, alongside the texts of their own lives, while seeking to transform mothering practice-- highlighting revolutionary praxis within books, or, when none is available, creating new visions for social change. Many essays interrogate the tensions of maternal narrative--the negotiation of the historical location of writer and readers, narrative and linguistic constraints, and the slippery ground of memory--as well as the borders constructed between the "objective" scholar and the reader who engages with and identifies with texts through her intellect and her emotional being.
Download or read book A Mother s Memories written by Georgene Muller Lockwood and published by . This book was released on 1997-04 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
