Suzanne Degges-White , PhD, LPC, LMHC, NCC, is Professor and Chair of the Counseling, Adult and Higher Education department at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL.

Also, you wouldn’t find out the sex at the first scan – they offer gender scans from about 16 weeks but the NHS will offer to tell you the gender scan at 20 weeks. Her mother’s were “small and weird and dear,” and indeed, those are good words for the woman herself. In 2019, the narrator (we never learn her name) travels to London, where her rambles through the city awaken memories of a London vacation with her mother three years earlier. This is a compelling and fabulous story about relationships and life and what mothers will do to protect their children, I loved it from start to finish, it was a hard book to put down and what a beautiful setting, a beautiful cottage Anchor House on the coast of a small English village Tilsham.The utterly gripping story follows Sarah, a successful woman who kidnaps a five-year-old girl living with an unfit mother. When I finished the memoir, I told Indie about it during one of our Zoom visits, explaining how it reminded me of us, especially the ending. Having passed away while residing at a treatment program in Colorado, Elise quickly began questioning the American substance-abuse treatment system that failed her daughter – her daughter was unsuccessful through more than five programs, making it evident that there is a bigger problem at hand.

The commonalities and the differences that emerge enable us to think not only about mothers and daughters but also about national literatures, and national feminist movements, in new ways. So this is grief, she thinks, the apprehension of what could have been: “I could feel my mother’s joy on the London Eye, her love of heights and good views. But Mother utters it six weeks before she dies, after years of cognitive decline; it seems equally possible that it was the dementia talking. The essays—contemplative, interrogations of the self and memory—range from ninety-three pages in the opening essay to two pages. This 1995 novel focuses on twelve-year-old Hattie Barnes, whose mother, Maggie, suffers from mental illness so severe (and sometimes violent) that the entire family lives in constant fear and uncertainty.She is sent to the foster care system where she finds herself living in challenging situations, learning new rules at each home. A few weeks later, Indie read it, crying at the end as I had, once again recognizing the two of us on the page in someone else’s story.