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The Year My Mother Came Back Hardcover – March 31, 2015

4.7 out of 5 stars 51 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Algonquin Books (March 31, 2015)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1616203196
  • ISBN-13: 978-1616203191
  • Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 1.1 x 7.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #853,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Kindle Edition
While this moving memoir speaks quite explicitly to the mother/daughter dynamic, it also speaks to any close relationship where one of the people is gone. I generally don't like to give much detail away in a review, not to mention that many other reviews lay out the general events that form the heart of this work. What I would prefer to do is explain where this wonderful book took me while I was lost in the pages. This will be similar to what many others have experienced and, to a considerably smaller degree gives an idea of how this memoir works, and make no mistake, this memoir absolutely works.

My father passed away from cancer while I was in college, insisting I not put my education on hold. I went through the usual grief-like emotions upon getting the call from my mother he had died. For weeks, maybe months, I thought I grieved, and I guess I did but not nearly the way I did several years later. When I found myself in a situation that would always have made me call and talk to my father, I picked up the phone and called. It wasn't until my mother answered that I remembered he was not there any longer. While that hit me hard, and triggered what I took to be the true grief, it was the aftermath of that call that stayed with me to this day. My father did indeed help me through my difficult period. He spoke to me in my mind, through my dreams and walked me through it. In other words, he had so instilled how he thought and how he had always helped that I could "hear" him giving me advice and asking questions I would not likely have asked myself as myself.

Cohen's memoir has potentially traumatic situations through which her mother helps her, and is told in a tender yet strong manner sorely lacking in my little paragraph.
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Format: Hardcover
I didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked this book up. Most memoirs have a yawn factor that this book was lacking. The Year My Mother Came Back was so close to home for me. Not that I am mourning my mother, but that I think every woman can relate to loosing her mother at some point in her life journey.

Alice shares the story of her mother coming back to her. She is long gone, literally, from this world. Her echos carry Alice through a very tough time in her life. Told in Alice’s POV, we learn about her present struggles and the reason for the rift between her and her mother. Her mother died at the age of 57 of a cerebral hemorrhage when Alice was 22 and fresh out of college. After surviving breast cancer and a double mastectomy when Alice hit puberty, Alice’s mother came home a shell of the woman she once was, and Alice and her mother drifted apart, as mothers and daughters do. At their last meeting, her mother said she was truly happy for the first time in a long time. Thirty one years later Alice finds herself talking to her mother through her own motherly difficulties. Her adopted daughter is finding her birth mother and going off to college, and her biological daughter is going into surgery to correct a birth defect. On top of all of this, Alice is diagnosed with breast cancer herself.

Memories flood into the space left empty for thirty years. I don’t resist. I want my mother with me. At this moment I don’t need to be a mother, I just want to be a daughter.

This book is filled with all the wonder that is being a mother, and all the pain of being a daughter. I couldn’t help but to reflect my own relationship to my mother, and the one I hope to have with my daughters. The struggle to be everything to your children is so real.
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Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
Someone once asked Abraham Lincoln how he could remain so cheerful and humorous in the face of personal tragedy and political turmoil. He answered simply, "You're as happy as you decide to be."

It's a courageous answer and an appealing one, but is it the whole story? This author remembers her childhood as a tense time of parental conflict in an unwelcoming neighborhood. Her older and younger sisters remember a happy family with intelligent, creative parents who protected their daughters from ignorance and prejudice. OK, parents don't treat all their children the same and the age at which a child experiences difficult times influences their reactions, but there's GOT to be more to it.

This is a book about mothers and daughters and two diseases which may or may not be "inherited" - breast cancer and clinical depression. It's about how women juggle their various "jobs" and never feel completely satisfied about how they're performing any of them.

It's a beautiful book. The author is an artist and playwright. She tells the story of five generations of her family and how they have shaped each other. There are flashbacks and fantasies and yet the reader is never confused and never loses interest in the eccentric cast of characters. She opens up completely and tells her story without attempting to defend her actions or paint herself in a favorable light. It takes guts and skill to do that and not come across as whiny and self-absorbed, but she's as likable and sympathetic as any memoir writer I've ever read.

Thank God for Amazon's Daily Deals. I get books there I would not be able to afford otherwise and this one is a treasure.
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