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The Year My Mother Came Back: A Memoir
Author:
Cohen, Alice Eve
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Class:
Biography
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: HQ755.85
Print Run: 12000
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ISBN-13: 9781616203191
LCCN: 2014031973
Imprint: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
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Pub Date: 03/31/2015
Availability: Out of Print Confirmed
List: $23.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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276 pages ; 19 cm
H 7",
W 5"
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
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Bibliographies:
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Awards:
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Starred Reviews:
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TIPS Subjects:
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Family Life
Death and Dying
Biography, Individual
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BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Death, Grief, Bereavement
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Motherhood
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LC Subjects:
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Children with disabilities, United States, Biography
Cohen, Alice Eve
Cohen, Alice Eve, Family
Jewish women, United States, Biography
Motherhood, United States, Biography
Mothers and daughters, United States, Biography
Parent and child, United States, Biography
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| Annotations |
| Publisher Annotations | 11/04/2014 |
| Thirty years after her death, Alice's mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year of parenting Alice has had to face. 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 navigates 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. Eventually, understanding and then forgiving her mother's parenting transgressions leads her to accept herself and to realize that she doesn't have to be perfect to be a good mother. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 05/01/2015 |
| Alice Eve Cohen certainly has a complicated relationship with motherhood, and it smacked her in the face during a daunting period she chronicles vividly in The Year My Mother Came Back . Strangely, the ghost of her mother suddenly appeared, 31 years after her death, just when Cohen faced seemingly overwhelming personal challenges. In a previous book, What I Thought I Knew, the divorced mother of an adopted daughter wrote about finding out at age 44 that she was six months pregnant, after years of infertility and months of strange symptoms. In her latest book, her beloved surprise daughter, Eliana, is an active fourth-grader in need of painful surgery. At the same time, Cohen (now happily married) is diagnosed with breast cancer, just as her mother was years ago. Meanwhile, as Cohen's older daughter, Julia, is about to leave for college, she gets in touch with her birth mother. This collision of events results in a maelstrom of emotional upheaval for Cohen, who finds much-needed comfort in the presence of her mother's spirit: "We revisit events from our past together. Sometimes we just talk. Always, my mother is there and she is not there." This thoughtful memoir shows how our past and present remain constantly intertwined, and how being a mother is a complex journey that's often full of stunning surprises. Alice Cary. 288. BOOKPAGE, c2015. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 01/26/2015 |
| In this finely wrought memoir, Cohen (What I Thought I Knew) handles nearly overwhelming events. Her adopted-at-birth daughter, now 18, finally reconnects with her birth mother. Cohen's biological daughter, whose conception was a surprise because of Cohen's diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer and the consequent hormone treatments, has to undergo a difficult leg-lengthening surgery at age eight to correct a birth defect that Cohen feels responsible for causing. Through this prism, Cohen remembers her own mother, Louise, who passed away 30 years prior. Cohen takes readers on a journey through her immediate travails, as well as through her troubled childhood dealing with a mother whose own battle with cancer transformed her emotionally and physically. Cohen's mother was a trailblazing champion of civil rights, an early feminist who bemoaned the trappings of a stay-at-home motherhood and fought for her intellectual life. Cohen ultimately gets closure with her mother, who gives her advice beyond the grave about how to be a better mother, how to face cancer, and how, ultimately, to be a daughter who finally finds peace with the complex woman who had more of an impact on her life than she ever realized. (Mar.). 288p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2015. |
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9781616203191,dl.it[0].title
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