From My Mother S Back Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of From My Mother S Back book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
In this warm and honest memoir, celebrated academic Njoki Wane shares her journey from her parents' small coffee farm in Kenya, where she helped her mother in the fields as a child, to her current work as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Moving smoothly between time and place, Wane uses memories, painful and tender, to show how her early lessons and the support given by her family allowed her to succeed as a woman of colour in the academy, and to later lift up her students facing their own difficult journeys.
An innovative memoir connecting ideas of grief, memory, and animals to illustrate the importance of storytelling. When his mother died, Timothy C. Baker discovered that there was almost no record of her existence, and no stories that were his to tell: the only way to bring her back was through reading. Reading My Mother Back is a genre-bending memoir that explores a life marked by trauma, illness, religion, and abuse through a focus on the books Baker and his mother shared. The book combines accounts of rereading childhood classics with true and apocryphal stories of a quiet life, marked by great sorrow and great joy. The book is about grief and memory and how our childhood reading shapes the way we see the world; it’s about loneliness and the search for belonging; it’s about how ordinary lives are transfigured by storytelling. Moving from accounts of American evangelical communities to kidney failure, from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, and from guilt to love, Baker shows how literature provides a framework for understanding our experiences, and offers a way of connecting with everything we have lost. The book illustrates how children’s animal stories bring us into a love of the world, and how acts of rereading become a way not of assuaging grief, but of bringing the past and present together. Reading My Mother Back offers a bold and personal view of why the stories we read and share matter so much. And there are bunnies.
My Mom Is a Foreigner, But Not to Me by Julianne Moore Pdf
Discover this special ebook written and read by bestselling author and award-winning actress Julianne Moore! In My Mom Is a Foreigner, But Not to Me, Julianne Moore pays homage to all the Muttis, Mammas, and Mamans who are from another country. A foreign mom may eat, speak, and dress differently than other moms—she may wear special clothes for holidays, twist hair in strange old-fashioned braids, and cook recipes passed down from grandma. Such a mom may be different than other moms, but...she is also clearly the best. Vividly illustrated by Meilo So, this funny and heartwarming picture book about growing up in multiple cultures celebrates the diverse world in which we live. This version includes a read-along setting. If your device allows audio, you can listen along as Moore reads the story aloud!
How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.
Writing Back Through Our Mothers by Tegan Zimmerman Pdf
For the first time in the literary tradition, the contemporary woman's historical novel (post-1970) is surveyed from a transnational feminist perspective. Analyzing the maternal (the genre's central theme) reveals that historical fiction is a transnational feminist means for challenging historical erasures, silences, normative sexuality, political exclusion, and divisions of labor. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 5)
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About by Michele Filgate Pdf
“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t talk about with our mothers affects us, for better or for worse. As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in acknowledging how what we couldn’t say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributions by Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen Pdf
“A riveting journey.” —Julie Metz, author of Perfection “A perfect book. I want to tell everyone, every mother, every daughter, to read it.” —Abigail Thomas, 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 death, Alice Eve Cohen’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice 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. Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, 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. Understanding and forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept her own and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother. “Alice Eve Cohen’s warm, witty, wise memoir is an elixir of love. It captures the struggles of every woman who ever wanted to be a better mother or daughter. Read it and weep, and laugh, and love.” —Nancy Bachrach, author of The Center of the Universe “Funny, painful, absurd, and heartwarming . . . Alice’s struggle to accept her imperfect self is a loving message tomothers who struggle to live life with grace. A beautiful book.” —Julie Metz, New York Times bestselling author of Perfection “Cohen navigates what was a perfect storm of a year . . . What she made of this year is a book so honest, so moving, and ultimately so wise that it is a privilege to take the journey with her.” —Abigail Thomas, bestselling author of A Three Dog Life “I love, love, love this book. It’s so rich, so real, and so moving . . . An astonishingly wonderful book—I was enthralled.” —Caroline Leavitt, bestselling author of Pictures of You “Compassionate, compelling, and told in luscious prose that practically begs you to sink in and linger, Cohen’s imaginative story and its fascinating characters will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.” —Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret
A memoir of mothers and daughters, hoarding, and healing. Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens…obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity—one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life’s biggest chaos: motherhood. Confronted with the daunting task of raising a daughter after her own dysfunctional childhood, Judy reflected on not only her own upbringing but the lives of her mother and grandmother, Jewish Polish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust. What she discovered astonished her. The women in her family, despite their differences, were even more closely connected than she ever knew—from her grandmother Zelda to her daughter of the same name. And, despite the hardships of her own mother-daughter relationship, it was that bond that was slowly healing her old wounds. Told with heartbreaking honesty and humor, this is Judy’s poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other’s lives.
"Lyrical and emotionally gutting." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Intellectually satisfying [and] artistically profound.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW) “Mesmeric.”—THE PARIS REVIEW “Vividly awesome and truly great." —EILEEN MYLES “Gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable." —LENI ZUMAS “Brilliant.” —MICHELLE TEA An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her. Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking lyrical memoir. To understand the end of her story, we must go back to the beginning. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where anti-Semitism and an imbalance of power were omnipresent in her home. At just eleven years old, Shalmiyev’s father stole her away to America, forever abandoning her estranged alcoholic mother, Elena. Motherless on a tumultuous voyage to the states, terrified in a strange new land, Shalmiyev depicts in urgent, poetic vignettes her emotional journeys through an uncharted world as an immigrant, artist, and, eventually, as a mother of two. As an adult, Shalmiyev voyages back to Russia to search endlessly for the mother she never knew—in her pursuit, we witness an arresting, impassioned meditation on art-making, gender politics, displacement, and most potently, motherhood.
“[A] geriatrician’s guide to stepping in as escort, caregiver and advocate for your parent’s final journey . . . comforting in its compassion and detail.” —St. Petersburg Times Geriatrician Dennis McCullough has spent his life helping families to cope with their parents’ aging and eventual final passage, experiences he faced with his own mother. In this comforting and much-needed book, he recommends a new approach, which he terms “Slow Medicine.” Shaped by common sense and kindness, grounded in traditional medicine yet receptive to alternative therapies, Slow Medicine advocates for careful anticipatory “attending” to an elder’s changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions—an approach that improves the quality of elders’ extended late lives without bankrupting their families financially or emotionally. As Dr. McCullough argues, we need to learn that time and kindness are sometimes more important and humane at these late stages than state-of-the-art medical interventions. My Mother, Your Mother will help you learn how to: Form an early and strong partnership with your parents and siblings Strategize on connecting with doctors and other care providers Navigate medical crises Create a committed Advocacy Team Reach out with greater empathy and awareness Face the end-of-life time with confidence and skill Although taking care of those who have always cared for us is not an easily navigated time of life, My Mother, Your Mother will help you and your family to prepare for this complex journey. This is not a plan for getting ready to die; it is a plan for understanding, for caring, and for helping those you love live well during their final years. And the time to start is now.
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen Pdf
“A riveting journey.” —Julie Metz, author of Perfection “A perfect book. I want to tell everyone, every mother, every daughter, to read it.” —Abigail Thomas, 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 death, Alice Eve Cohen’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice 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. Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, 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. Understanding and forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept her own and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother. “Alice Eve Cohen’s warm, witty, wise memoir is an elixir of love. It captures the struggles of every woman who ever wanted to be a better mother or daughter. Read it and weep, and laugh, and love.” —Nancy Bachrach, author of The Center of the Universe “Funny, painful, absurd, and heartwarming . . . Alice’s struggle to accept her imperfect self is a loving message tomothers who struggle to live life with grace. A beautiful book.” —Julie Metz, New York Times bestselling author of Perfection “Cohen navigates what was a perfect storm of a year . . . What she made of this year is a book so honest, so moving, and ultimately so wise that it is a privilege to take the journey with her.” —Abigail Thomas, bestselling author of A Three Dog Life “I love, love, love this book. It’s so rich, so real, and so moving . . . An astonishingly wonderful book—I was enthralled.” —Caroline Leavitt, bestselling author of Pictures of You “Compassionate, compelling, and told in luscious prose that practically begs you to sink in and linger, Cohen’s imaginative story and its fascinating characters will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.” —Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret
NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A phenomenal, human story. . . . I could not put this book down." —CLARA HUGHES An instant national bestseller, this raw and affecting memoir is the story of a mother and daughter who beat the odds together. Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler running the biggest race of her life at the 2004 Olympics, she carried more than a nation's hopes—she carried her mother Catherine's dreams. In 1974, Catherine is determined and tenacious, but she's also pregnant with her second child and just scraping by in St. Lucia. When she meets a wealthy white Canadian family vacationing on the island, she knows it's her chance. They ask her to come to Canada to be their nanny—and she accepts. This was the beginning of Catherine's new life: a life of opportunity, but also suffering. Within a few years, she would find herself pregnant a third time—this time in her new country with no family to support her, and this time, with Perdita. Together, in the years to come, mother and daughter would experience racism, domestic abuse, and even homelessness, but Catherine's will would always pull them through. As Perdita grew and began to discover her preternatural athletic gifts, she was edged onward by her mother's love, grit, and faith. Facing literal and figurative hurdles, she learned to leap and pick herself back up when she stumbled. This book is a daughter's memoir—a book about the power of a parent's love to transform their child's life.
This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and poems—the city of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," during the years before World War II. Centered on the figure of Grade's mother, Vella—simple, pious, hard-working—this is a richly detailed account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We see Vella, desperate after losing her husband, become a fruit-peddler, struggling to survive poverty and to remain true to her faith in the face of human pettiness and cruelty. We follow Grade as he walks in the footsteps of his scholar father, a champion of enlightenment; we see him entering marriage, and his mother finding some peace of mind in a marriage of her own—all of this in a world recalled with extraordinary physical and emotional intensity. Then, World War II. The partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany is followed by the new German invasion of June 1941. Grade—believing, as do so many others, that the Nazis pose a danger chiefly to able-bodied men like himself—flees into Russia. In his travels on foot and by train he meets a fascinating, kaleidoscopic array of characters: the disillusioned Communist Lev Kogan; the durachok, or simpleton, a young prisoner who, mistaken for a German spy, is shot when he jumps from a train; the once-prosperous lawyer, Orenstein, who virtually becomes a beggar, dies and is buried by strangers in a remote Central Asian village. With the war's end, Grade returns to Vilna—to find the ghetto in ruins, to learn that his wife and his mother have gone to their deaths—and he is left with nothing but memories. But it is here, amid the devastation of a people, that he finds the compulsion and the passion to commit to paper the world that has been lost.