Girl Rearing - Hardcover

Aldrich, Marcia

4

29 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393027481 ISBN 13: 9780393027488

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1998

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The author's memoir recounts growing up in the 1950s under the influence of her mother's ideas of femininity, the tragic early death of her sister, and her own rebelliousness, and describes her struggle to raise her daughter alone. 12,000 first printing.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Successfully recounting a life without true suffering requires a certain degree of cool objectivity, critical self-awareness and humane wisdom. Unfortunately, Aldrich's first book of roughly chronological essays (some of which originally appeared in the Northwest Review) lacks such depth. Aldrich grew up as the comfortably middle-class child of an estate lawyer and a homemaker. The grievances of her childhood seem to be that her room was too pink; she didn't like her given name; she had to eat tomatoes; and her mother was overwhelmingly tidy. It can be hard to see beyond the kvetching to the writing, but even that can seem strained, as in these two passages about the loathed fruit: "So I ate the tomato, but not without consequences for her who made me eat it" and, later, in a deeply improbable dialogue, "I hate the way sliced tomatoes lay inert on cold white plates. Lizzie Borden hated tomatoes." What the reader immediately sees, but Aldrich doesn't seem to, is that her mother, the child of an early divorce whose first husband (not Aldrich's father) and eldest daughter both died tragically, desperately needed to impose order and control in the domestic sphere that she lacked in the larger world. And though she might have been a neatnik, she did rebel against the tyranny that dinnertime held over a woman's life in the '50s and '60s when Aldrich was growing up. For her part, Aldrich, like many other comfortable baby boomers, lacked specific grievances but luxuriated in the romance of rebellion. By comparison to memoirs of dire poverty, abuse, persecution, this comes across as profoundly self-indulgent.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Aldrich begins this overwhelmingly sad memoir by detailing her birth in an alley. Devastated by her foiled plans for the birth, Aldrich's mother continues to block the experience and, indirectly, her new daughter out of her mind. Isolation and guilt haunt Aldrich for the rest of her life and keep her with "one foot in life and one foot in death, precarious there, balancing." In the tradition of Wally Lamb's fictional She's Come Undone (LJ 5/1/92) Aldrich's story moves through an adolescence where, among other horrors, she helplessly stands ashore as one of her sisters drowns in a storm, and an adult life filled with failed romantic and platonic relationships. All of this leads to a nervous breakdown that forces her to analyze her past and question some of her deepest feelingsAincluding her very real fear of repeating the pattern with her own daughter. Though Aldrich succeeds in drawing the reader into her tragedies, her unwavering sadness will defeat many others.AEmily Jones, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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