Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The bond between father and daughter can be one of the strongest either family member will experience in his or her lifetime. In Fatherless Women, Clea Simon, a writer for the Boston Globe, examines challenges daughters face when this relationship is severed by the death of the father. With all but one chapter focusing on women who have lost their fathers after adulthood, Fatherless Women traces the father-daughter relationship and how it manifests as a girl grows up, how it affects her, and what that relationship leaves behind when it's gone. Simon describes some of her own experiences and discusses, with an emphasis on pervasive trends, the immediate changes that can take place within one or two years after the death of a father. By delving into every aspect of a woman's life, both personal and professional, Simon covers a multitude of topics, including how women mourn in order to resolve father-daughter issues, changing mother-daughter relationships, trends of family commitment following this loss, challenges marriages face after the loss, refining needs in response to death, and how goals can change after losing a father. The book ends with "The Journey over Time," describing how bereaved daughters often incorporate elements of their fathers into their own lives and families over time. --Rhonda Langdon --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

When fathers die, says Simon (Mad House), a Boston Globe journalist, their daughters may experience crucial changes in their lives. Some will feel freed of their father's expectations and strictures. Some will want to have a baby. Some will already have worked out their issues with their dads years earlier and will simply feel grief at the loss of a parent. Some will forge a whole new relationship with their mother, if she's still living. Everything is possible, and may depend on the daughter's sexuality and age, on whether the parents were divorced or unhappy with each other. Or none of these things may happen, or if they do, they may not depend on the aforementioned factors. Such rampant indeterminacy is meant to sound embracing and supportive; instead, it reads like equivocal psychobabble. Despite plenty of valid and judicious observations ("When we lose a parent, we move up a step in the generational hierarchy"), the narrative feels flat and unsubstantiated. Simon writes mostly based on her own experience of her father's death and has also talked to friends and read some popular psychology books on fathers and daughters and on death and grieving. Her friends' experiences are used to illustrate some of the ways paternal death affects daughters, while experts are invoked to give the book some clout. (Oct.)Forecast: Too anecdotal to pass as scholarship, and too dull for popular appeal, this book will need a lot of big-name endorsements before anyone's going to buy it for herself or a grieving girlfriend, the only conceivable market for this strangely unaffecting volume.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (August 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471228958
• ISBN-13: 978-0471228950
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #208,905 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars moving through grief to growth, October 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Hardcover)

"Fatherless Women" explores what for many of us will be a scary, and challenging journey: Growing up from "good girls" to become "smart women." With lots of stories from dozens of women, it shows us how we grieve -- not always what you'd expect! -- and how, if we let ourselves mourn the death of our fathers, we can learn to appreciate them as humans and then understand all the ways they influenced us. With other stories, we're shown how this new insight not only helps us with our sadness and guilt -- it can also free us to be the women we want to be, taking the best of our fathers' legacies to us and dumping the worst (including our own overreactions). An invaluable guide -- and really affirming of my experience since my dad's passing!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Aid in Dealing with the Death of Your Father, March 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Hardcover)

This book is really outstanding. I recommend it to anyone who has just lost their father or for someone who has not gotten a handle on their loss however long ago it was.

Clea Simon writes as though she is speaking directly to you. She tells her own painful story and comforts her reader in doing so. Ms.Simon tells of many other women's experiences of losing their fathers so the reader gets many different perspectives on father/daughter relationships and how these daughters dealt with losing their fathers.

Fatherless Women, for me, chronicled all the feelings I had felt, did feel and would feel during the grieving process. I was very comforted by this book. It made me feel I was part of a group so I stopped feeling so alone and isolated. It made me familiar with my feelings so I could give a name to what I am/was going through.

Her book is an easy to read, informative, reassuring and very personable account of one of the most difficult things women go through.

I would not have been able to begin my healing without this book. I thank you from the depths of my soul, Clea Simon.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply felt and beautifully written, November 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Hardcover)

I heard an interview with Clea Simon on a public radio show, and having lived through the loss of a close relative myself, I invested in her book. I found it to be a comforting and perceptive book, with many interviews that shed light on the possibility of living through loss and getting beyond it. Simon is generous with her own reflections, and her writing is lovely. I will be recommending this book to my friends.