Helpful Score: 6
This book starts out "I didn't like my mother. and I certainly didn't love her. I know she didn't like me either. I can't say whether she loved me, as I don't remember her ever telling me so." This is the first hand telling of a mother/daughter relationship that is painful to read. Misunderstandings and missed opportunities abound. As both a daughter and a mother of girls, this is telling of a story I don't want to live even through a book. It is a story of pain and hurt on all sides. For all that, it is a very compelling story that was very well written. I did not realize that it was Alyse Myers first book until after I had read the entire book and was looking at the back cover. It did leave me feeling very melancholy.
Helpful Score: 5
a grim story, dreary at times, though there is closure. Basically:
Overachiever from good family and underachiever from not-so-good fall in love as teens and marry early (author's mother and father); three quick daughters later (author is oldest), they're fighting all the time, and essentially separated. Author was father's favorite, which mother (and sisters) resents when he dies young, with mother transferring her hostile feelings from him to author-as-teen. Years of separation, followed by a (more-or-less) reconciliation with dying mother. Her teen years, even before the father died, kind of reminded me of a Dave Pelzer's story in that the younger sisters didn't mind the way the mother treated the author at all.
Be prepared to go through chapter after chapter of vicarious psychological and emotional abuse.
Overachiever from good family and underachiever from not-so-good fall in love as teens and marry early (author's mother and father); three quick daughters later (author is oldest), they're fighting all the time, and essentially separated. Author was father's favorite, which mother (and sisters) resents when he dies young, with mother transferring her hostile feelings from him to author-as-teen. Years of separation, followed by a (more-or-less) reconciliation with dying mother. Her teen years, even before the father died, kind of reminded me of a Dave Pelzer's story in that the younger sisters didn't mind the way the mother treated the author at all.
Be prepared to go through chapter after chapter of vicarious psychological and emotional abuse.
