Amazon.com Review
Kim Chernin, author of
The Hungry Self and
In My Mother's House, has already written extensively about her own mother. She has also collected countless mother stories--stories that have the force of myth that are told by women about their mothers. In this intriguing book, Chernin asserts that in order for daughters to become complete individuals, they must, in some sense, psychically "birth" their own mothers. In explaining this provocative theory, she presents characteristic elements of the mother story, including idealization, blame, guilt, forgiveness, and letting go ("giving birth"). She then challenges the reader to trace these elements and identify the themes in six "real but invented" portraits of women and their mothers. During this moving and sometimes confusing process, readers will eventually come to a new level of understanding about the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship--leaving any candy-coated, romanticized vision far behind.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother--beautifully written and often painful to read--generates more questions about mothers and daughters than it answers, but you'll never look at a mother-daughter story in the same way again.
--Ericka Lutz
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on accounts of mother-daughter conflicts that she heard about as a practicing psychoanalyst, Chernin (Reinventing Eve) provides a method for resolving the problems that can dominate this relationship in her perceptive and creative study. According to the author, many women are locked into a cycle of blaming and forgiving their mothers for any difficulties they have experienced. To transcend this pattern, Chernin recommends that a woman learn to "give birth" to her mother by changing the destructive dynamic that has existed between them through the healing power of storytelling. Telling and retelling the story of this relationship is supposed to take a woman through the seven stages of idealizing, revising, blaming, forgiving, identifying with, letting go of and finally giving birth to a new vision of her mother. Chernin recounts the compelling stories of several women for whom this process, she claims, has fostered self-development, including a woman who brought her mother home from a 30-year stay in a mental institution and another who extricated herself from a stifling mother-daughter relationship. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
