“A perfect book. I want to tell everyone, every mother, every daughter, to read it” (Abigail Thomas, New York Times–bestselling author of A Three Dog Life).
For the first time in decades I’m remembering Mom, all of her—the wonderful and terrible things about her that I’ve cast out of my thoughts for so long. I’m still struggling to prevent these memories from erupting from their subterranean depths. Trying to hold back the flood. I can’t, not today. The levees break.
Thirty years after her mother’s death, Alice Eve Cohen starts to see her again, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: The year one daughter needs a harrowing surgery, another daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and she herself receives a daunting diagnosis. As it turns out, it’s entirely possible for the people we’ve lost to come back to us when we need them the most.
Though letting her mother back into her life is not easy, Alice approaches it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood and allow herself to be a daughter once more in order to take care of her own girls—and forgive her mother’s transgressions so she can forgive herself for her own—in this “wry, magical memoir about the transcendent power of mother-daughter love” (Elle).
“Funny, painful, absurd, and heartwarming . . . Alice’s own struggle to accept her imperfect self is a loving message to mothers who struggle to live life with grace. A beautiful book.” —Julie Metz, New York Times–bestselling author of Perfection
