Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Carroll, a writer and therapist, bore quite a cross in rearing her fiery, unstable daughter, the rock icon who sets this memoir in motion by trumpeting her pregnancy. Fearing a "curse of the firstborn daughter," Carroll is seized with the urge to seek her own biological mother and mend a tattered matrilineal line. She discloses her past with a sprawling account of Catholic schools, friendships, romances and pregnancies in 1960s San Francisco, in prose mired with detail but often wry and touching. Carroll's social-climbing adoptive parents seem at best ambivalent, at worst cruel. In 1993, after Courtney's rise to fame and stormy estrangement from Carroll, the author finds her biological mother: Paula Fox, the acclaimed children's author who became pregnant as an abandoned teen. The two are kindred spirits, and it's a heartwarming twist that the act of writing, on many levels, becomes Carroll's portal to her past. The promise of dish on Courtney and the emotional reunion with Paula—along with Carroll's tender wit and poignant honesty (Courtney's siblings saw her "as glamorous, but with sharp claws and teeth")—will keep readers soldiering through this often exhaustive history.
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From Booklist

Despite the suggestive subtitle, Carroll's memoir is far less tell-all than it is her personal recollections of growing up feeling alienated from her adoptive family, her peers, and her religion. Born with an inquisitive mind, Linda has trouble relating to her tightly wound adoptive mother, Louella, and her sexually abusive adoptive father, Jack. While her friendships with other girls are deep and stable, her relationships with men prove to be much more complicated. Carroll finds herself pregnant at 18 by a man she does not love, but she marries him and gives birth to a girl, Courtney. The marriage does not last, and Carroll spends the next decade in search of happiness, marrying twice again and going as far as New Zealand as her relationship with Courtney deteriorates. Years later, when Courtney is pregnant with her own child, Carroll finally seeks her own birth mother and is surprised to discover she is renowned writer Paula Fox. A thoughtful memoir of one woman's coming-of-age in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (January 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385512473
• ISBN-13: 978-0385512473
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #388,312 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing memoir..., February 12, 2006

By	M. Nichols (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Although it starts slowly, Linda Carroll's "Her Mother's Daughter" emerges as a fascinating life story, full of sorrow and grace. Once I got into it I had great trouble putting it down. Her life is a rich one -- child of San Francisco priviledge turned hippie and mother of six, Carroll undergoes a staggering amount of personal loss while dealing with life's usual uncertainties.

The fact that Carroll is Courtney Love's mother is really only incidental to the story. The scenes between them are painful to read. I am only vaguely familiar with Love's side of the story, but she does not come off well. I sense this book is not the balm needed to bring mother and daughter back together. Readers will come away hoping they can resolve their problems before it's too late.

More inspiring is the reunion between Carroll and her birth mother, Paula Fox. This book has a happy ending of sorts, although we sense it isn't really the end of the story.

If you are a fan of "The Glass Castle" by Jeanette Walls you will probably like "Her Mother's Daughter" too. I know I did.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compassionate, mature memoir, January 21, 2006

By	Susan Beekman (Detroit, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Her Mother's Daughter is compelling , riveting reading. Carroll explores her early life in a thoughtful and honest way, mellowed by a mature understanding. Her writing is fresh, both in wording and imagery.
I never had the sense that this even WAS a celebrity tell-all book because it's not so much about Courtney love as about the challenges her mother faced throughout her own earlylife as she struggled to find her own voice and place in the universe. She has clearly succeeded, based on the powerful and insightful voice telling the story. Other equally important characters (besides Love) are San Francisco of the fifties and early sixties, Paula Fox, and the many friends and characters who weave through the narrative with all the life force of the author herself. I highly recommend this page-turner

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling and dignified story, February 21, 2006

By	Lizzi "Lizzi" (Burlington, Vermont) - See all my reviews

Linda Carroll has written such a good book I found myself reading the last page over and over because I didn't want the story to end.Each of the era's she descibed had characters that came alive with the flavor of the times, the stodgy fifties, the wild and defiant 60's, the alternative life 70's.Through all the losses in her life she kept finding the next thing to sustain her, and only after she found some peace in herself did she look for and find her birth mother,author Paula Fox. The only criticism I had was that I wanted to hear more about her mother,what it was really like after all the years of fantasizing about her. The last chapter is beautiful,honest, and raw, and I held the book for a long time before I closed it.