Motherless Daughters: The Legacy Of Loss - Hardcover

Edelman, Hope

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201632888 ISBN 13: 9780201632880

Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books, 1994

Synopsis

The classic New York Times bestseller that has helped millions of women cope with and heal from the grief of losing their mothers

Although a mother's mortality is inevitable no book has discussed the profound lasting and far reaching effects of this loss until Motherless Daughters, which became an instant classic. More than twenty years later, it is still the go-to book that women of all ages look to for comfort, help, and understanding when their mother dies. Building on interviews with hundreds of mother loss survivors, Edelman's personal story of losing her mother, and recent research in grief and psychology, Motherless Daughters reveals the shared experiences and core identity issues of motherless women:

• Why the absence of a nurturing hand shapes a woman's identity throughout her lifespan
• How present day relationships are defined by past losses
• How a woman can resolve past conflicts and move toward acceptance and healing
• Why grief really is not a linear passage but an ongoing cyclical journey
• How the legacy of mother loss shifts with the passage of time

About this title

Review

Edelman shares her own painful story and the stories of many other women who, as children or adults, lost their mothers. She explains the stages of grief and adjustment. She considers the secondary effects that can occur: the girl-child filling the lost mother's role at home for father and younger siblings. If you've lost your mother, you no longer have to face it alone.

From the Publisher

"In the tradition of Passages and My Mother, My Self, this unique, personal, and ground-breaking New York Times best-seller -- the first of its kind -- explores the profound pain of mother loss among women and is available here for the first time in paperback. "When my mother died, I knew no woman my age who had experienced mother loss. I felt utterly and irrevocably alone. In college, where new friends knew only as much about me as I was willing to reveal, I told few people my mother had died. I searched the university library and local bookstoresfor writings about mother loss. In each book I found about mother-daughter relationships, I quickly flipped ahead to the chapter about a mother's death, but discovered they all assumed the reader would be in her forties or fifties when her mother dies. I was eighteen." --excerpt from Motherless Daughters.
Not only for motherless daughters, but for all women who want to better understand the mother/daughter relationship, this beautifully written work inspired an Anna Quindlen column; appeared in the New York Times, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, and San Francisco best-seller lists; and received an extraordinary amount of media attention including a feature on The Today Show. Hope Edelman lost her mother to breast cancer when she was eighteen. Unable to find a book to help her understand and cope with that loss, she decided to write her own. She posted notices asking motherless women to share their experiences with her, and was unprepared for both the number of responses she received, and for their emotional intensity. Eventually meeting with 92 women and surveying 154 by mail, Hope was able to compare how mother loss affects daughters differently depending on their ages, their relationships to their mothers, their father's attitude, and the support or dependency of siblings. But more important Hope's book explores what these women share -- a void in their lives they canno t seem to fill. Their common experiences and insights will help motherless daughters, and those who care about them, come to better understand how this painful loss shapes lives forever.

"A moving and valuable treatment of a neglected subject, jolting us into awareness of the profound problems mother loss leaves in its wake." -- The New York Times Book Review.

"Many women will find this book painful, but it's reassuring to have the company of others with the complex emotions and lifelong effects of a mother's loss."-Kirkus Reviews.

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0201632888
• ISBN 13: 9780201632880
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 324